In the key of blue and other prose essays

IN THE KEY OF BLUE

IN THE KEY OF BLUE AND
OTHER PROSE ESSAYS BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

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LONDON

ELKIN MATHEWS

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

MCMXVIII

PR

First Printed, January, 1893.

Second Edition, October, 1895.

fhird Edition (Unaltered Reprint), October, 19 IH

PREFACE

SEVERAL of these Essays have not yet appeared
in print. Others are republished from the
"Fortnightly," "Contemporary," and "New"
Reviews ; one from the " Century Guild
Hobby-Horse ."

There is an interval of more than thirty years
between the earliest of the series, " Clifton and a
Lad's Love," and the latest.

I have tried to make the selection representative
of the different kinds of work in which I have
been principally engaged — Greek and Renaissance
Literature, Description of Places, Translation,
Criticism, Original Verse.

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

September 1892,

CONTENTS

FAGK

IN THE KEY OF BLUB ...... i

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 17

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO .... 43
THB DANTESQUE AND PLATONIC IDEALS OF LOVE . 55

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 87

LA B&TB HUMAINE in

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 133

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE ..... £55
NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME .... 177
CULTURE : ITS MEANING AND ITS USES . . . 195
SOME NOTES ON FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN ' . . 217
THE LYRISM OF THE ROMANTIC DRAMA . . .241
LYRICS FROM ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS . . .265

IN THE KEY OF BLUE

THE nomenclature of colour in literature has
always puzzled me. It is easy to talk of green,
blue, yellow, red. But when we seek to distin-
guish the tints of these hues, and to accentuate
the special timbre of each, we are practically left
to suggestions founded upon metaphor and ana-
logy. We select some object in nature — a gem,
a flower, an aspect of the sky or sea^which
possesses the particular quality we wish to indi-
cate. We talk of grass-green, apple-green, olive-
green, emerald-green, sage-green, jade-green ; of
sapphire, forget-me-not, turquoise, gentian, ultra-
marine, sky-blue; of topaz, gold, orange, citron;
of rose and cherry, ruby and almandine, blood
and flame. Or else we use the names of sub-
stances from which the pigments are compounded:
as yellow-ochre, burnt-sienna, cadmium, lamp-
black, verdigris, vermilion, madder, cinnabar. To

A

2 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

indicate very subtle gradations, the jargon of
commerce supplies us liberally with terms like
mauve, magenta, eau-de-Nile, peacock, merda-
d'oca, Prussian-blue, crushed strawberry, Vene-
tian-red, gris-de-perle, and so forth to infinity.
It is obvious that for purely literary purposes
these designations have a very unequal value.
Some of them are inadmissible in serious com-
position. The most precise often fail by inter-
preting what is absent from the reader's mental
eye through what is unknown to his intelligence.
Not everybody is familiar with jade, cadmium,
almandine, Nile-water. What the writer wants
would be a variety of broad terms to express the
species (tints) of each genus (hue). In such
terms some of the colours are richer than others.
Green, I think, is the poorest of all. After
verdant, it has to be contented with compounds
of itself, like pea-green and those which I have
cited above. The Greeks had no generic name
for green except one which also meant pale.
Next to this they used an adjective derived from
the leek. Blue fares better with its azure,
cerulean, celestial, amethystine. Yellow is still
more fortunate, rejoicing in golden, saffron,
orange, flaxen, tawny, blonde. Red stands at
the head of the list, possessing a copious voca-
bulary of ruddy, rosy, russet, crimson, scarlet,
pink, sanguine, mulberry, carnation, blushing.

IN THE KEY OF BLUE 3

It will be noticed that all these words denomi-
nating tints are eventually derived from sub-
stances which have been accepted into common
parlance. In one shape or another, for example,
blood and the rose contribute largely to the
phraseology of red.

The poverty of language upon which I am
insisting is not wholly disadvantageous to a
stylist. It forces him to exercise both fancy and
imagination in the effort to bring some special
tint before the mental vision of the reader ; while
all the branches of knowledge at his command,
even heraldry, are laid under contribution in
turns.

These thoughts were in my mind at Venice,
where the problem of colour gradations under
their most subtle aspect presents itself on all
sides to the artist. I had been especially
attracted to the qualities of blue in the dresses
of both men and women, and to the behaviour of
this colour under various effects of natural and
artificial light. Justice has lately been done by
some contemporary painters to blue as worn by
the Venetian women. But no one, so far as I
am aware, has set himself the task of repro-
ducing the costumes of men in single figures or
in masses. Yet it is just among the working
people — fishermen, stevedores, porters, boatmen,
artizans, facchini — that the best opportunities

4 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

are offered for attempting symphonies and har-
monies of blue. Whole classes of the male
population attire themselves in blouses, sashes,
and trousers of this colour. According to the
fancy of the individual, or the limitations of his
wardrobe, the arrangements of tints are infinitely
varied in the same costume. Stuffs faded by
washing and exposure blend with new crude
dyes. Dirt and stains of labour, patchings of
harder upon softer tones, add picturesqueness.
And whether the flesh- tints of the man be pale
or sun-burned, his complexion dark or fair,
blue is equally in sympathy with the model.
Some men show remarkable taste in the choice
and arrangement of the tints combined. It is
clear that they give no little thought to the
matter. Modulations from the main chord of
three decided blues are made by tones of lavender
or mauve in the blouse, the sash, or the stockings.
Under strong sunlight, against the greenish water
of the canals, the colour effects of such chromatic
deviations are piquant and agreeable.

It struck me that it would be amusing to try
the resources of our language in a series of
studies of what might be termed " blues and
blouses." For this purpose I resolved to take a
single figure — a facchino with whom I have been
long acquainted — and to pose him in a variety of
lights with a variety of hues in combination.

IN THE KEY OF BLUE 5

What follows are notes taken for these studies,
most of them, I may add, caught by accident,
not sought deliberately.

II

It was a hot June night. Scirocco lay heavy
on the air, swathing Venice in damp mists of
inky darkness, brooding low upon the city, yet
not interfering with the local pungency of lamp-
light. I had gone with friends to a theatre
where Boito's Mefistofile was being creditably
represented. At the end of the prologue I left
the house, intending to return for the prison
scene and the beautiful last act. I crossed the
Rialto, strolled through the Pescheria, and
walked slowly along the Riva dell' Olio. At
the very end, upon the barriers of the traghetto,
under the flaring gas-lamp, Augusto was sitting
gazing dreamily and tired across the Grand
Canal. Scattered lights broke the surface of the
water, and gondolas, like glow-worms, now and
then moved silently upon that oily calm.
Augusto was intensely blue, giving the single
blot of colour on a ground of gloom. This
suggested the first of my studies :

A symphony of black and blue —
Venice asleep^ vast night^ and you.

6 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

The skies were blurred with vapours dank :

The long canal stretched inky-blank,

With lights on heaving water shed

From lamps that trembled overhead.

Pitch-dark ! You were the one thing blue ;

Four tints of pure celestial hue :

The larkspur blouse by tones degraded

Through silken sash of sapphire faded,

The faintly floating violet tie,

The hose of lapis-lazuli.

How blue you were amid that black,

Lighting the wave, the ebon wrack t

The ivory pallor of your face

Gleamed from those glowing azures back

Against the golden gaslight; grapes

Of dusky curls your brows embrace,

And round you all the vast night gapes.

Augusto, though he was then nineteen years of
age, had never left Venice for a day. He once went
to Mestre with wine-casks, touched the land, and
returned in one of those great barche. He
wanted to know what the world of fields and
woods was like, where horses moved the vehicles,
instead of men, and the high-roads are not paved
with water. Willing to pleasure him, I proposed
that we should spend a couple of days in the
Euganean Hills. The first day took us to Val
San Zibio. Here we visited that ancient garden
of enchantment, with its pleached alleys and
labyrinths of box, the gush of mountain streams

IN THE KEY OF BLUE ^

conducted through stone basins among sculptured
deities, the huge umbrageous chestnuts swaying
heavy limbs above smooth gravelled paths. We
slept at Val San Zibio, in company with silk-
worms. Next day we drove through Praglia,
and round by Rovolone, up to Teolo. On
that drive Augusto gave me the second of my
studies. His blue dress was now combined
with white :

A symphony of blues and white —
You, the acacias, dewy-bright,
Transparent skies of chrysolite.
W» wind along these leafy hills;
One chord of blue the landscape thrills,
Your three blent azures merged in those
Cerulean heavens above the blouse.
The highest tones flash forth in white :
Acacia branches bowed with snow
Of scented blossom ; broken light ;
The ivory of your brows, the glow
Of those large orbs that are your eyes :
Those starry orbs of lustrous jet
In clear enamelled turquoise set,
Pale as the marge of morning skies.

There is an osteria in the Calle del Campanile,
where I sometimes go to dine with Augusto.
The padrona cooks excellently, and the place is
frequented by sober people of the quarter.
They are all of them very poor, tired with labour,
clothed in the most homely garb. At the end of

8 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

the day's work a little suffices to amuse them —
itinerant musicians, a bit of dancing among them-
selves, a glass of wine added to the frugal store
of bread and sausages they bring in handker-
chiefs or newspapers. The company is well-bred,
and they do not receive a stranger unwillingly,
provided they see that he has found a mate of
their own kindred. It was here that Augusto
suggested the third of my studies in blue :

A symphony of blues and brown —

We were together in the town :

A grimy tavern with blurred walls,

Where dingy lamplight floats and falls

On working men and women, clad

In sober watchet, umber sad.

Two viols and one 'cello scream

Waltz music through the smoke and steam:

You rise, you clasp a comrade, who

Is clothed in triple blues like you ;

Sunk in some dream voluptuously

Circle those azures richly blent,

Swim through the dusk, the melody;

Languidly breathing, you and he,

Uplifting the environment;

Ivory face and swart face laid

Cheek unto cheek, like man, like maid.

The host of this osteria, which has no name
or sign by which it may be known, is called
Giovanni. The blank back of the Church of
S, Casciano frowns down upon his house, and

IN THE KEY OF BLUE g

chokes the light out. He has a heap of children,
the youngest of whom come home at nightfall
just after we have finished supper. Augusto
one evening took a little bright-eyed girl belong-
ing to the family upon his knee. We were
sitting with the table between us, and a gas
lamp above our heads. That is the motif of my
fourth study :

A symphony of pink and blue,

The lamp, the little maid, and you.

Your strong man's stature in those three

Blent azures clothed, so loved by me;

Your grave face framed in felt thrown back ;

Your sad sweet lips, eyes glossy black,

Now laughing, while your wan cheeks flush

Like warm white roses with a blush.

Clasped to your breast, held by your hands,

Smothered in blues, the baby stands :

Her frock like some carnation gleams ;

Her hair, a golden torrent, streams :

Blue as forget-me-not her eyes,

Or azure-winged butterflies :

Her cheeks and mouth so richly red,

One would not think her city-bred.

Your beautiful pale face of pain

Leaned to the child's cheeks breathing health;

Like feathers dropped from raven's wing,

The curls that round your forehead rain

Merged with her tresses' yellowy wealth ;

Her mouth that was a rose in spring

10 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

Touched yours, her pouting nether lip
Clasped your fine upper lip, whose brink,
Wherefrom Love's self a bee might sip,
Is pencilled with faint Indian ink.
Such was the group I saw one night
Illumined by a flaring light,
In that dim tavern where we meet
Sometimes to smoke, and drink and eat;
Exquisite contrast, not of tone,
Or tint, or form, or face alone.

Augusto and I were once more in the country
together. This time we fared further, and found
a nook of the hills which was all overgrown with
yellow shrubs and plants in bloom. The sun-
light was intense, and summer in the air. He
lay prone in grass, which was not so much
grass as a vast field of cloth of gold. The blues
he wore struck me as giving its accent to the
scene, and so I made a fifth study :

A symphony of blues and gold,

Among ravines of grey stones rolled

Adown the steep from mountains old.

Laburnum branches drop their dew

Of amber bloom on me, on you :

With cytisus and paler broom,

Electron glimmering through the gloom.

Around us all the field flames up,

Goldenrod, hawkweed, buttercup ;

While curling through lush grass one spies

Tendrils of honeyed helichryse.

IN THE KEY OF BLUE n

'Tis saffron, topaz, solar rays,
Dissolved in fervent chrysoprase.
Cool, yet how luminous, the blue,
Centred in triple tones by you,
Uniting all that yellow glare
With the blue circumambient airt
The violet shades, the hard cobalt
Of noon's inexorable vault.

How are blues to be combined with green ?
That question haunted me, until I passed in my
gondola one day down a narrow Rio, where there
was a dyer's workshop. Augusto had nothing
to do with the study which I place sixth on my
list. It must be noticed that the tone of blue here
indicated is very low, and that of green is dimin-
ished to mere notes and suggestions. It might have
been possible to discover a concord of blue and
green under intenser conditions of light and
colour, as when, in the afterglow, barges laden
with fresh-cut grass glide against the purples of
the east. Yet, as I saw the harmony, I give it
here in verse :

A symphony of blues and green,
Swart indigo and eau-marine.
Stripped to the waist two dyers kneel
On grey steps strewn with orange peel;
The glaucous water to the brink
Welters with clouds of purplish ink:
The men wring cloth that drips and takes
Verditer hues of water-snakes^

12 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

While pali paled by sun and seas

Repeat the tint in verdigris.

Those brows, nude breasts, and arms of might,

The pride of youth and manhood white,

Now smirched with woad, proclaim the doom

Of labour and its life-long gloom.

Only the eyes emergent shine,

These black as coals, those opaline;

Lighten from storms of tangled hair,

Black curls and blonde curls debonnairt

Proving man's untamed spirit there.

The lagoon toward Fusina takes the whole
glory of Venetian sunset. The sun sinks down
into the Lombard plain, incarnadining the vault of
clouds and the vast mirrors of the undulating
water floor. Colours which are cold by nature
now assume an unexpected warmth. The blue
of blouse and sash and trousers passes trans-
figured into gems or flowers. It is raised to
amethyst, irradiated with crimson. Alone with
Augusto at such a moment, I obtained the
seventh of my studies :

A symphony of blues and red—-
The broad lagoon, and overhead
Sunset, a sanguine banner, spread.
Pretty of azure and pure gules
Are sea, sky, city, stagnant pools:
You, by my side, within the boat,
Imperially purple float,
Beneath a burning sail, straight on
Into the west's vermilion.

IN THE KEY OF BLUE 13

The triple azures melt and glow
Like flaunting iris-flowers arow ;
One amethystine gem of three
Fused by the heaven's effulgency.
Now fails the splendour, day dies down
Beyond the hills by Padua's town;
And all along the eastern sky
Blue reassumes ascendency.
Lapped in those tints of fluor-spar,
You shine intense, an azure star,
With roses flushed that slowly fade
Against the vast aerial shade.

I have made Augusto pose long enough as a
mere model or lay figure, dressed in three sorts
of blue, composing pictures. The next study,
in which the sense of colour is not wholly lost,
deals at last with more actual and kindly human
sympathies. I give it as the record of a day
spent in a little town between Treviso and
Vicenza. The old towers and walls of Castel-
franco still exist ; and a moat surrounds them
filled with running water. The walls and
turrets rise, covered here and there with ivy,
from green banks — intensely red in their time-
mellowed brickwork. The banks are planted
like a garden with flowering shrubs and trees,
among which, at the time of our visit, clumps of
Guelder roses, with their heavy white bosses in
full bloom, were conspicuous. Around the
ancient burgh, separated from the moat by a

14 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

broad high-road, runs a suburb of low houses,
with mediaeval arcades ; and there are avenues
of tall white poplars. The town and its suburb
form two squares, at one angle of which, fronting
Giorgione's great white marble statue, is the
Albergo della Spada, a Venetian palace with
Gothic windows, and a balustraded balcony
adorned with little seated lions.

At Castelfranco, with a blouse

Venetian, blent of triple blues,

I walked all through the sleepy town,

Worshipped Madonna gazing down

from that high throne Giorgione painted

Above the knight and friar sainted,

Drank in the landscape golden-green,

The dim primeval pastoral scene.

The blouse beside me thrilled no less

Than I to that mute loveliness;

Spoke little, turned aside, and dwelt

Perchance on what he dumbly felt.

There throbbed a man's heart neath the shirt,

The sash, the hose, a life alert,

Veiled by that dominating hurt.

Then swept a storm-cloud from the hills ;

Eddying dust the city fills,

The thunder crashes, and the rain

Hisses on roof and flooded plain.

Ere midnight, when the moon sailed low,

Peering through veils of indigo,

We went abroad, and heard the wail

Of many a darkling nightingale,

IN THE KEY OF BLUE 15

Pouring as birds will only pour

Their souls forth when heaven's strife is o'er.

Those red walls, and the mighty towers,

Which lustrous ivy over-flowers,

Loomed through the murk divinely warm,

As palpitating after storm.

Hushed was the night for friendly talk ;

Under the dark arcades we walk,

Pace the wet pavement, where light steals

And swoons amid the huge abeles :

Then seek our chamber. All the blues

Dissolve, the symphony of hues

Fades out of sight, and leaves at length

A flawless form of simple strength,

Sleep-seeking, breathing, ivory-white,

Upon the couch in candle-light.

I will now close this fantasia on blues and
blouses with an envoy to the man who helped
to make it. An artist in language must feel the
mockery of word-painting, though he is often
seduced to attempt effects which can only be
adequately rendered by the palette. Description
is not the proper end of writing. Word-paint-
ings are a kind of hybrid, and purists in art
criticism not irrationally look askance at the
mixed species.

" Pictures or poems ? Dithyramb or prose ?
What are they?" cries this critic. This replies:
" Word-pictures or verse-idylls, no man knows ! "
" One thing is sure," a third saith : " Sure he lies,
Who finds in these thrice-sifted rhapsodies

1 6 IN THE KEY OF BLUE

The stuff of good plain writing!" "Put them by,"
A fourth, more cautious, murmurs; "time will try."

Were silence, then, not better than this speech?

Words do no work of pencil, palette, brush,

Words are designed to thrill the heart, or teach;

Not to depict, not to revoke the blush

Of dawn, or reincarnadine the flush

Of sunset ; break this wavering wand, and go

Back to thy books, poor powerless Prospero.

Nevertheless, something may still be pleaded
in favour of verbal description. If it be suffi-
ciently penetrated with emotion, it has by its very
vagueness a power of suggestion which the more
direct art of the painter often misses. Sym-
pathetic minds are stimulated to acts of creation
by the writer, while pictures make demands upon
their assimilative faculties alone.

How can words paint this warmth of blues,

Blended with black, white, brown, all hues ?

Longhi we want, Tiepolo,

To make us moderns feel blue so :

They knew the deep Venetian night,

The values of Venetian light,

Venetian blouses led them right.

Come back, my Muse, come back to hint

Who warmed the cold hue, bright or dim.

Those ivory brows, those lustrous eyes,

Those grape-like curls, those brief replies ;

These are thy themes — the man, the life —

Not tints in symphony at strife.

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

I

A LAND less rich in natural, artistic, and historical
attractions than Italy could not afford to leave
a district so charming as that of the Euganean
Hills almost unknown, unvisited. No guide-
books talk about these little mountains ; there is
nothing of importance, so far as I am aware,
written on them from the historical or any other
point of view. Express trains carry troops of
tourists along their outskirts from Bologna to
Padua and vice versa. All English people who
read our poets know that Shelley called them —

" Those famous Euganean hills which bear,
As seen from Lido through the harbour piles,
The likeness of a clump of peaked isles"

Their purple pyramids, lifted against the orange
of the western sky, form an indispensable

B

1 8 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

ingredient of the orthodox Venetian sunset.
Their reflections in the blue mirror of the
lagoons, although they are so far away, count
as one of the chief wonders of the beautiful Vene-
tian mornings. Yet I rarely meet with man or
woman who has had the curiosity to invade the
Oreads of the Euganeans in their native haunts,
and to pluck the heart out of their poetic
mystery.

It has been my own good fortune to spend
several weeks on different occasions at the villa
of a noble lady who resides not far from Mon-
selice. So I have enjoyed special opportunities
of becoming acquainted with this fascinating
island in the ocean of the Lombard plain. For
variety and delicacy of detail, for miniature
mountain grandeur, it may be compared with
what we call the English Lakes. The scale is
nearly similar, though the Euganeans are posi-
tively smaller, and are placed in far more inter-
esting surroundings. What they lack is water.
This defect is balanced by the richness of
Italian vegetation, by the breadth of the great
landscape out of which they heave, by the imme-
diate neighbourhood of famous cities, and by
the range of snowy Alps which tower upon
their northern horizon.

I cannot offer anything like a detailed
study of the Euganean Hills. What follows in

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 19

these pages consists of three extracts from my
diary, made in the May month of three several
years, relating aimless but highly enjoyable
ramblings about their gentle declivities and
wooded valleys.

II

Este is a town of great antiquity, mentioned
under its old name of Ateste both by Tacitus
and Pliny. The Adige in former times flowed
by its walls ; and etymologists derive the city's
name from Athesis. The museum is rich in
Roman inscriptions, which are said to have
drawn Professor Mommsen on a visit to the
quiet place. Here in the Middle Ages dwelt the
Italian members of the mighty house of Guelph ;
who took their title from Este, and afterwards
ruled Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio as Dukes.
At present the town has little to show of interest,
except some picturesque ruins of wall and tower,
crumbling away upon the southern promontory
of the Euganeans, under slopes of olive and
almond and vine.

Just above the town, surveying it from a kind
of terrace, is the villa called I Cappuccini, which
Lord Byron lent to the Shelleys in the autumn
of 1818. " We have been living," writes Shelley

20 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

to Peacock on the 8th of October, " this last
month near the little town from which I date
this letter, in a very pleasant villa which has
been lent to us. Behind here are the Euganean
hills, not so beautiful as those of the Bagni di
Lucca, with Arqua", where Petrarch's house and
tomb are religiously preserved and visited. At
the end of our garden is an extensive Gothic
castle, now the habitation of owls and bats,
where the Medici family resided before they
came to Florence. We see before us the wide,
flat plain of Lombardy, in which we see the
sun and moon rise and set, and the evening
star, and all the golden magnificence of autumnal
clouds." I do not know to what tradition about
the Medici Shelley was referring. It is true
that Cosmo di Medici was banished in 1433 to
Padua ; and he may possibly have spent part of
his short exile at Este. I think it more probable,
however, that Shelley confused the Medici with
the Dukes of Ferrara, who took their family
title from the old fief of Este.

In this villa Shelley composed the first part
of Prometheus Unbound. ll I have been writing,
and indeed have just finished, the first act of a
lyric and classical drama, to be called Prometheus
Unbound" From Padua he wrote, September
22, to his "best Mary": "Bring the sheets of
Prometheus Unbound, which you will find num-

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 21

bered from I to 26 on the table of the pavilion."
The people who now inhabit I Cappuccini still
show this pavilion, a little dilapidated summer-
house, overgrown with ivy, at the end of a garden
terrace. It was also near Este, having climbed
one of the many-peaked summits above the town,
that Shelley improvised the " Lines written in
the Euganean Hills."

From Este to Arqu£ is no great distance.
The road for some time skirts the hills, then
turns abruptly upward to the left, leading to the
village, which is picturesquely placed among its
fruit-trees in a hollow of the arid limestone
mountains. Arqua looks at first sight like a
tiny piece of the Riviera, with the hazy Lombard
plain in lieu of the Mediterranean. Petrarch's
house is a fair-sized white cottage at the extreme
end of the village, one of the highest dwellings of
Arqua. From its windows and garden-walls the
eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pome-
granates to the misty level land which melts into
the sea ; churches with their companili rising
from the undetermined azure, like great galleys
stranded in a lagoon. It is the constant recur-
rence of this Lombard distance, the doubt
whether we are gazing upon land or sea, the
sense of the neighbouring Adriatic and Venetian
salt-lakes, which lends a peculiar charm to
Euganean landscapes.

22 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

Petrarch's study is a tiny room, with a little
northern window, opening out of a larger ante-
chamber. There was just enough space in it to
hold a table and his arm-chair, which is stiH
preserved, as well as a book-cupboard. Here,
then, the old poet fell asleep for the last time
among his books, upon the i8th of June 1374.
He had lived at Arqua" since 1369, studying in-
cessantly and writing with assiduity till the very
end. One of the last things he composed was a
Latin version of his friend Boccaccio's story of
Griselda. They show the mummy of a cat,
wholly destitute of hair, which is said to have once
been his " furry favourite." Probably the beast
is no more genuine than Wallenstein's celebrated
horse at Prague.

The house contains several spacious rooms,
with chimney-pieces of a later date, and frescoes
setting forth in quaint quattrocento style the loves
of Laura and the poet. One of these, which
represents the meeting of Petrarch and his lady,
might almost be called pretty ; a bushy laurel
sprouts from Petrarch's head, Laura has a Cupid
near her ; both are pacing in a verdant meadow.

The village church of Arqua" stands upon an
open terrace with a full stream of clearest water
— chiare e fresche onde — flowing by. On the
square before its portal, where the peasants
congregate at mass-time, rises the tomb of

23

Petrarch : a simple rectilinear coffin of smooth
Verona marble, raised on four thick columns,
and covered with a pyramidal lid — what the
Italians call an area. Without emblems, alle-
gories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the in-
spired poet, the acute student who opened a new
age of intellectual activity for Europe, suggests
thoughts beyond the reach of words. Petrarch
was emphatically the first modern man, the indi-
viduality who began to disengage art and letters
from mediaevalism. Here he sleeps, encircled
by the hills, beneath the canopy of heaven ; and
his own winged thoughts, "forms more real than
living man, nurslings of immortality," the ethe-
real offspring of his restless heart and brain,
seem to keep watch around him in the liquid
air.

There is a village inn within a few steps of
this piazza, where the excellent white wine of
Arqu£ may be tasted with advantage. Grown
upon that warm volcanic soil of the Euganeans,
in the pure dry climate of the hills, it is generous
and light together. Experience leads me to
believe that it does not bear transportation ; for
the Arqua wine one sometimes finds in Venice
has lost in quality. This, however, is a charac-
teristic of very many Italian wines ; and nothing
is more charming in that incomparable country
than the surprises which are always awaiting the

24 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

oenophilist (as Thackeray calls him) in unex-
pected places, villages unknown to fame, and
wayside hostelries.

To Battaglia we drive through a swamp of
willows and tall bullrushes and bending reeds.
The quiet pools and dykes which slumber in this
mass of vegetation are abloom with white and
yellow water-lilies, iris, water-violet, and flower-
ing rush. Some great birds — wild geese, I
think — were flying and feeding there, as I drove
through the marshland in the early morning.

Battaglia and the neighbouring village of
Abano are both celebrated for their baths and
springs of hot sulphurous water. Here we
understand in how true a sense the Euganean
Hills are a volcanic upheaval from what must
have been a great sea at the time of their emer-
gence. The ground is so hot and hollow, so
crusted with salts and crystalline deposits, and
the water which spouts up in miniature geysers
is so boiling, that one wonders when a new
eruption is going to take place. On autumn
evenings, a mist from the warm springs hangs
over Abano, giving it a dreamy look as the train
whisks by. But this is no vapour of malaria.
The country indeed is singularly healthy.
Abano was known to the Romans. They called
it Aponus ; the name being derived, it is said,
from a Greek adjective which means painless — a

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 25

kind of parallel to Posilippo. Hundreds of folk,
then as now, came to rid themselves of rheumatic
pains and other ailments in the mud-baths and
hot mineral water. Suetonius says that when
Tiberius was a young man, the object of suspicion
to his stepfather, Augustus, he visited Padua
upon the occasion of a journey into Illyria.
" There he consulted the oracle of Geryon,
which bade him cast golden dice into the foun-
tain of Aponus, in order to obtain an answer to
his questions. This he did accordingly, and the
dice thrown by him turned up the highest pos-
sible numbers. The dice themselves can be seen
to this day in the water."

Geryon, according to one version of his
legend, was a king of Hesperia ; and Hercules
is said to have opened the springs of Battaglia
and Abano by ploughing with his oxen there.
The ancients seem to have symbolised the vol-
canic nature of this country in several myths.
It is difficult not to connect the legend of Phae-
thon, who fell from heaven into the Po, burned
up the waters of Eridanus, and converted the
tears of the river-nymphs to amber, with some
dim memory of primitive convulsions. At this
point I would fain turn aside to dally with the
two books of Pontano's Eridani, than which
modern scholarship has produced nothing more
liquid, more poetical, more original in Latin

26 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

verse. But ne quid nimis : for now the domes
and towers of Padua begin to loom in the dis-
tance— the vast roof of the Palazzo Ragione,
the fanciful cupolas of S. Antonio, harmonious
and lovely S. Giustina — while we jog along the
never-ending straight banks of the canal, and
the Euganeans sink cloudlike into azure air be-
hind us.

Ill

Two days ago I started with three friends,
two Venetians and an Englishman, for the Euga-
nean Hills. The day was very hot for the season,
since we are still in the middle of May. Our
object was to make an early ascent of Venda,
the highest point of the group, which looks so
graceful and so lofty from the lagoons near Mala-
mocco. Venda rises only a little over two thou-
sand feet above the sea. But it has the sweep
and outline of a grand mountain.

We spent the afternoon and evening at Val
San Zibio, in the Albergo alia Pergola : about
half an hour's drive out of Battaglia. There is
a villa there with gardens, built and planned
originally in the early seventeenth century by a
member of the Barbarigo family. The place
afterwards passed to the Martinenghi of Venice,
and now belongs to the Conte Dona delle Rose.

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 27

The dwelling-house has been modernised and
ruined in appearance by the destruction of the
statues and florid architectural decorations which
brought it formerly into keeping with those mas-
sive walls, old-fashioned iron gratings, barocco
groups of gods on balustrades and fountains,
remaining in the ancient pleasure-ground. On
the great front gates to the garden, where the
water from the hills comes rushing down by steps,
the coat of Barbarigo is splendidly displayed :
" Argent on a bend gules, between six beards
sable, three lioncels passant or" It is the same
coat which adorns the Scala dei Giganti and one
of the great chimney-pieces in the Ducal Palace.
There is nothing, perhaps, exactly comparable
to this old-world garden at Val San Zibio.
Placed at the opening of a little glen, or coomb,
descending from a spur of Venda, it fills the whole
space up, and works into complete harmony with
the surrounding wildness. The formal landscape
gardening of two centuries ago has been mellowed
by time, so as to merge imperceptibly, without
the slightest break or discord, into bowery woods
and swelling hills. The compassed fish-ponds,
the moss-grown statues of aquatic deities, the
Cupids holding dolphins which spout threads of
water from their throats, the labyrinth of clipped
box, the huge horse-chestnut trees, the long green
alleys of hornbeam twisted into ogee arches over-

28 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

head, the smooth-shaven lawns, and the myriad
gold-fish in the water-lilied tanks — all these ele-
ments of an aristocratic pleasance melt, as it
were, into the gentle serenity of the leafy heights
above them, the solemnity of cypress avenues,
the hoary stillness of olive orchards, the copses
of hazel, elm, acacia, chestnut. Nowhere, indeed,
have I seen art and nature married by time and
taste with such propriety and sympathy of feel-
ing. It is delightful to saunter through those
peaceful walks, to hear the gush of waterfalls,
and to watch the fountains play, while the sun is
westering, and the golden-verdant cup of the
little valley swims in light-irradiated haze.

We four friends enjoyed this pastime for an
hour or so ; and then, after strolling awhile in
acacia woods above the hamlet, we returned to
an excellent supper at our inn. It was served
in a corner of the kitchen : one of those large
brick-floored rooms, with wooden rafters, and a
pent- house chimney-piece half open to the air,
which Tintoretto sometimes painted — notably in
his Cenacolo, at the Scuola di S. Rocco. Such
kitchens always contain an abundance of copper
vessels and brass salvers hung about the walls,
from the appearance of which the wary guest
may form a tolerably accurate prognostication of
his coming meal. At our hostel of the Pergola
the copper and brass gear was not only plentiful,

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 29

but almost as dazzling as Atlante's shield in the
Orlando. And the supper corresponded to these
happy auspices. Signora Fortin, our hostess,
served it with her own hands, hissing from the
hearth. The menu ran as follows: — "Risi-bisi,"
a Venetian mess of rice and young peas stewed
in gravy ; veal cutlets, with asparagus ; lettuce-
salad, home-made sausage, and cheese from the
pastures. Good white wine of the Arqua type
satisfied our thirst ; and when the simple meal
was finished, my three companions sat down to
play tresett with the jovial Boniface. I, who had
no skill at cards, wandered out into the moon-
light, pacing country lanes alive with fire-flies
and glow-worms. Then came the divine night
of sleep in lowly bed-chambers with open
windows, through which entered the songs of
nightingales, the plash of falling waters, and the
sough of heavy-foliaged trees.

In the morning we started at six o'clock for
Venda. We had been promised a putelo, a
ragazzo — a boy, in fact, to carry our provisions.
He turned out a red-haired toper, over fifty
years of age, with a fiery nose. However, he
performed his function as a beast of burden.
The hedgerows were drenched with dew, bringing
out the scent of wild-rose, privet, and acacia-
blossom. Scirocco brooded in the air, foreboding
an afternoon of thunderstorm. From Galzignano,

30 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

a village at the foot of our mountain, we began
the ascent to Rua — the first stage of the easy
climb. The hillsides here were abloom with
silver cistus, golden broom, gaudy orchises,
starred anthericum lilies, purple columbines, and
creamy potentillas swaying from a slender stalk.
Rua is a spacious convent, covering several acres
on a spur of Venda. Within its walled enclosure
are separate dwellings for the monks who live
there, cottages united by common allegiance to
the church which rises in their midst. It ought
to be a paradise for men who have renounced
the world, desire seclusion, and are contented
with a round of rustic labour and religious duties.
But as we skirted the long wall of the convent
precincts, I wondered how many of its inmates
may have missed their vocation — for whom that
vast extent of landscape and the distant cities
seen upon the plain are only sources of perpetual
irritation. For, as we rose, the view expanded ;
the isolated position of the Euganeans, like an
island in an immense sea, made itself more and
more felt. By glimpses through the thickets of
dwarf chestnut, hornbeam, or hazel, we gazed
upon aerial Alps, long silvery lagoons, the lapse
of rivers flowing to the Adriatic, and brown
villages with bell-towers for their centre.

The summit of Venda is a long rolling down,
which reminded me of the Feldberg in the Black

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 31

Forest. The ruins of an ancient convent crown
its southern crest. This must have erewhile
been a noble edifice ; for the abandoned walls
are built to last for ever, in a severely massive
Benedictine style. They abut upon a kind of
precipice ; and the prospect they command is
the whole Lombard plain to south and west,
fringed with the silver-edged lagoons and sea,
threaded by the Adige, and gemmed with
venerable seats of human habitation, among
which Montagnana stands conspicuous. Upon
the other side of Venda, the line of the Tyrolese
and Friulian Alps breaks the northern sky ;
Brenta flows through the fields to Padua ; and
the Monti Berici, descending from the mountains
of Vicenza, stretch out their feelers till they
almost touch the Euganeans at Bastia. From
this point, as from the top of one of those
raised maps men make in Switzerland, we can
study the structure of the tiny group of
mountains Venda crowns — so small in scale, so
exquisitely modelled, so finely pencilled in its
valley structure, so rich in human life and
vegetation.

It would be impossible to spend some hours
upon the crest of Venda, and not to think of
Shelley's poem. As a boy, I had those lines by
heart, and used to wonder dreamily about the
memorable landscape they describe :

32 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

"Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vapourous air,
Islanded by cities fair ;
Underneath day's azure eyes
Ocean's nursling, Venice lies,
A peopled labyrinth of walls,
Amphitrite's destined halls"

How true the picture is ! And then again :

"By the skirts of that grey cloud
Many-darned Padua proud
Stands, a peopled solitude,
'Mid the harvest-shining plain,
Where the peasant heaps his grain."

Yes, indeed, there is Venice, there is Padua,
there are the skirts of the grey cloud ; but the
Celtic anarch, the foes, the tyrants, of whom
Shelley sang, have now disappeared from Italy.
Are her sons happier, I asked myself, than
when the Frenchmen and the Austrians were
here?

While I was making these reflections, there
appeared upon the scene a youthful cowherd, or
vacher, with a hungry hound who loved him.
He was a bright lad, clear-cut in feature, nut-
brown of complexion, white of teeth, with pale
blue wistful eyes. He told us that he could
neither read nor write, that his mother was
dead, and his father confined in the madhouse

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 33

of San Servolo. He had been born and bred
on Venda ; and now he had drawn a number for
the army, and was just going to be drafted into
some regiment. I gave him my briar pipe for a
keepsake ; and then, having already spent three
lazy hours upon the top of Venda, we began
the descent upon the other side, breaking into
thickets of low brushwood. Here the air be-
came heavy with an aromatic resinous scent,
which I soon perceived to come from the mystic
Dictamnus fraxinella in full bloom. The coppice
reddened far and wide with the tall spires of that
remarkably handsome flower. At night, in cer-
tain conditions of the weather, it is said to be
phosphorescent; or, to put the fact perhaps
more accurately, it emits volatile oil in large
quantities, which readily ignites and burns with
a pale bluish flame around the ruddy blossoms.
After following a ridge, partly wooded and partly
down-land, for about an hour, we came to the
opening of the Val San Zibio ravine. Into this
we plunged — into a dense, silent, icy-cold wood
of hazels — where the air seemed frozen by
contrast with the burning sunlight we had left.
The descent through the coomb or gully to the
quiet hamlet, deep in verdure, called to mind
many a Devonshire or Somersetshire glen.

This morning, on the way back to Venice, I
visited Cataio, a castle built in the sixteenth

c

36 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

bring their bedding and furniture with them, and
take it away when they depart ; so that in their
absence the interminable corridors and cells,
refectories and parlours, cloisters and courts, are
whitewashed and dreary, scrawled over with the
names and jests of soldiers. Only two Padri are
left ; " Custodi for the State in a house where
we were once Padroni" said one of them with
a bitter smile, as he pointed to the ruthlessly
dilapidated library, the empty bookcases, the
yawning framework of the wooden ceiling, whence
pictures had been torn. These Padri simply
loathe the soldiers.

The architectural interest of Praglia centres in
three large cloisters, one of them lifted high in
air above magazines, cellars, and storehouses.
The refectory, too, is a noble chamber ; and the
church is spacious. But the whole building
impresses the imagination by magnitude, solidity,
severity — true Benedictine qualities — rather than
by beauty of form or brilliance of fancy. We
find nothing here of the harmonious grace (of
what Alberti called tutta quella musica, that
music of the classic style) which is so con-
spicuous in S. Giustina at Padua, itself an offshoot
from the mighty Abbey. The situation, too,
though certainly agreeable, on the skirts of the
hills, with a fair prospect over the broad
champaign, lacks that poetry of which one finds

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 37

so much in all parts of the Euganeans. Praglia
might be called a good specimen of massive
ecclesiastical prose.

We jogged on, through Montemerlo, toward
the group of hills which divide Teolo from
Rovolone, having the jagged cliffs of Pendice
first in sight, and then the deeply wooded
Madonna del Monte on our left hand, and the
Paduan plain upon the right. After about four
miles of this travelling under the noonday sun,
the road bends suddenly upwards, striking into
wood and coppice. The summit of the little pass
affords a double vista ; backwards over the
illimitable plain with Padua stretched out like a
map in hazy sunshine ; forwards to Bastia and
the Monti Berici. These miniature cols, deep in
chestnut and acacia groves, with the gracefully
shaped crests above them, make one of the main
beauties of the Euganeans. Tall purple orchids,
splashed with white, began to gleam in the thick
grasses, while here and there a flame-like spire
of fraxinella-bloom reminded me of Venda.

At length we plunged into the deep woods and
country lanes of Rovolone, remarkably English
in character, and halted at a roadside osteria.
The red wine here was excellent — one of those
surprises which reward the diligent cenophilist in
Italy. I decided to walk up to the church,
remembering our autumn visit of 1888, when a

36 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

bring their bedding and furniture with them, and
take it away when they depart ; so that in their
absence the interminable corridors and cells,
refectories and parlours, cloisters and courts, are
whitewashed and dreary, scrawled over with the
names and jests of soldiers. Only two Padri are
left ; " Custodi for the State in a house where
we were once Padroni" said one of them with
a bitter smile, as he pointed to the ruthlessly
dilapidated library, the empty bookcases, the
yawning framework of the wooden ceiling, whence
pictures had been torn. These Padri simply
loathe the soldiers.

The architectural interest of Praglia centres in
three large cloisters, one of them lifted high in
air above magazines, cellars, and storehouses.
The refectory, too, is a noble chamber ; and the
church is spacious. But the whole building
impresses the imagination by magnitude, solidity,
severity — true Benedictine qualities — rather than
by beauty of form or brilliance of fancy. We
find nothing here of the harmonious grace (of
what Alberti called tutta quella musica, that
music of the classic style) which is so con-
spicuous in S. Giustina at Padua, itself an offshoot
from the mighty Abbey. The situation, too,
though certainly agreeable, on the skirts of the
hills, with a fair prospect over the broad
champaign, lacks that poetry of which one finds

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 37

so much in all parts of the Euganeans. Praglia
might be called a good specimen of massive
ecclesiastical prose.

We jogged on, through Montemerlo, toward
the group of hills which divide Teolo from
Rovolone, having the jagged cliffs of Pendice
first in sight, and then the deeply wooded
Madonna del Monte on our left hand, and the
Paduan plain upon the right. After about four
miles of this travelling under the noonday sun,
the road bends suddenly upwards, striking into
wood and coppice. The summit of the little pass
affords a double vista ; backwards over the
illimitable plain with Padua stretched out like a
map in hazy sunshine ; forwards to Bastia and
the Monti Berici. These miniature cols, deep in
chestnut and acacia groves, with the gracefully
shaped crests above them, make one of the main
beauties of the Euganeans. Tall purple orchids,
splashed with white, began to gleam in the thick
grasses, while here and there a flame-like spire
of fraxinella-bloom reminded me of Venda.

At length we plunged into the deep woods and
country lanes of Rovolone, remarkably English
in character, and halted at a roadside osteria.
The red wine here was excellent — one of those
surprises which reward the diligent cenophilist in
Italy. I decided to walk up to the church,
remembering our autumn visit of 1888, when a

38 AMONG THE EUGAXEAX HILLS

dear friend of mine lay and shed tears on the
parapet. E vide e pianse il fato amaro, for he
had to leave Lombardy next day for London
and the British Museum. To-day the landscape
swam in summer heat, out of which emerged the
spurs of the Monti Berici, amethystine-blue ; and
the Alpine chain, which was so white and glitter-
ing on that October afternoon, could now be
hardly detected through sultry vapour. So I
retraced my steps down the rough sandstone road,
following the tinkling streamlet, between over-
arching boughs of maple, hornbeam, and wild
cherry. I found Domenico and Augusto still
drinking the excellent red wine and eating sattmt
in the osteria. When the nag was rested, we
helped him and the carriage down a broken lane
— more torrent-bed than pathway — into the main
road to Vo, At this point we struck abruptly
upward to the left, and reached Teolo through
a long straight valley between limestone hills.
The variety of soil, and the sudden alteration
from one kind of rock to another in the Euganeans,
together with the change of flora this implies, is
another of their charms. Here I noticed abun-
dance of tree-heath and starry snow-white
anthericum.

At the head of this long valley the view
gradually broadens out on every side. Teolo
is magnificently situated between the Madonna

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 39

del Monte and more distant Venda — Venda
stretching like a great green cloud, with Rua
perched upon its eastern spur, and the ruins
of the convent crowning the irregular summit.
But between the town and Venda lies a wide
expanse of undulating country, out of the ver-
dure of which shoot the grey double crags of
Pendice, in form reminding one not very dis-
tantly of Langdale Pikes.

Teolo occupies incomparably the finest point,
as it also is the central point, of the Euganean
district. It is important enough to be a station
for Carabinieri. Yet the little township lies so
scattered on the hillsides, that in my Alpine
home we should call it a Landschaft. I thought
involuntarily of Cadore, as I stood before the
door of the inn, an isolated house, the last house
of the village. There is a touch of Dolomite
feeling about the scenery of Teolo.

Domenico bade me go to sleep for a couple
of hours, which I did as well as I could through
the noise and singing of fifteen Venetian cortesani
in the next room. At six o'clock he called me
to begin the ascent of Pendice. Leaving the
street behind us, we passed out upon a ridge
which joins the terrace-side of Teolo to the
larger block of precipice and forest called Pen-
dice. Here one looks both ways over the
Lombard plain, spread out literally like an

40 AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS

ocean, and framed, as the sea might be framed,
by the inverted angles of valleys descending into
it on either hand. It took us rather more than
half an hour to reach the summit of the rock by
a pretty steep footpath. I suppose the crags
in vertical height on the eastern side are about
two hundred feet above the woods, which fall
away steeply to the valley bottom at the distance
of some three hundred feet farther. So the
impression of altitude is considerable, and the
fine bold cleavage of the stone increases the
effect. There are extensive and massive remains
of what must have once been a very formidable
castle, covering the whole of the upper platform,
and descending for a certain distance upon either
side. Henbane grows in rank luxuriance around
these ruins. But I am ashamed to say that I
know nothing about the history of this strong-
hold, nor about Speronella, the mediaeval heroine
of its romance. An old peasant who lives up
there, like an owl in a corner of the ruin, could
give no information. He waxed eloquent about
monks and bandits, bravi and maidens confined
in subterranean grottoes ; but of facts he was
as ignorant as I am.

From this point of vantage the view is really
glorious ; so much of plain visible to east and
west as gives a sense of illimitable space, with-
out the monotony of one uniform horizon ; then

AMONG THE EUGANEAN HILLS 41

the great billowy mass of Venda, the crest of
Madonna del Monte, and the rich green labyrinth
of dales and copses at one's feet. A furious
wind flew over us ; and a thunderstorm swept
across the southern sky, passing probably be-
tween Este and the Adige, lightening and thun-
dering incessantly. The old peasant told us
not to be anxious ; the storm was not coming
our way. So we sat down beneath a broken
wall, which seemed to tremble in the blast, and
enjoyed the lurid commotion of the heavens,
which added sublimity to the landscape. All
this while the sun was setting, flaringly red
and angry, in crimson contrast with the tawny
purples of the tempest clouds. The verdure of
hill, wood, and meadow assumed that peculiar
brilliancy which can only be compared to chry-
soprase ; and all the reaches of the Lombard
plain smouldered in violet blue. The sun
dropped behind the Monti Berici, and we
clambered down from our eyrie, glad to regain
the inn, to sup and sleep.

I will save one tiny episode from the ascent
to Pendice, and put it in the form of a dialogue,
as it really happened.

Domenico. — What herb is that ?

The Peasant. — Hemlock.

Augusto. (bending down to touch the plant.} —
Poor Socrates !

42 AMONG THE BUG A NE AN HILLS

/. — Socrates was the Jesus Christ of Greece.

Augusta. — Just so.

Next day, the whim came over me to drive
the whole way from Teolo, through Padua, Stra,
Dolo, to Mestre, and to regain Venice by the
lagoon. It meant rising at four and reaching
home at seven. But I wanted to get a notion
of what travelling was like in Lombardy before
the age of railways.

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO

VENICE in the last century produced four eminen,
painters, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Canalettto
Guardi, Longhi. Of these Tiepolo was by far the
greatest, in natural endowment, in splendour of
performance, in fecundity of production. Believers
in metempsychosis might have sworn, seeing his
grand style bud and bloom in that degenerate
age, that Paolo Veronese lived again in Tiepolo's
body. He has the same sincerity of conception,
the same firmness of execution, the same large-
ness, breadth, serenity and sanity, that we admire
in the earlier master. This is felt in the
frescoes of the Palazzo Labia, where the loves of
Antony and Cleopatra fill immense spaces with
mundane pomp and insolent animalism. How
grandly the great scenes are planned ; how large
and luminous the sky-regions, where masts
bristle and pennants flutter to the breeze of
Cydnus ; how noble the orders of the architec-
ture, enclosing groups of men and women,

44 ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO

horses, dwarfs, dogs, all in stately movement or
superb repose ! Then the fresco-painting is so
solid, the drawing and design so satisfactory,
the colouring so rich and varied, the types and
characters in face and form so strongly marked.
Of a truth, we say, here is a master of the
heroic age come to life once more in the century
of Castrati and Cicisbei, of wanton Casanovas
and neurotic Rousseaus and effeminate abbes.

It would be a mistake, however, to confine
our appreciation of Tiepolo to this one note of
his affinity to Veronese. Every artist of such
calibre has a distinction of his own. To seize
this characteristic and personal quality with
absolute certainty in the case of Tiepolo
requires some patience of analysis. At first we
are tempted to find it in those vast decorative
schemes for ceilings — apotheoses of Saints or
Heroes, with flying Angels, allegorical figures
upon clouds and cornices, in all possible atti-
tudes of violent movement and perilous foreshort-
ening : works in the barocco taste of the Italian
decadence, upon which the noble artist spent too
much of his energy and time. The contrast
between these soulless compositions and the
serious frescoes of the Labia palace is very
striking ; and here indeed we have something in
quite a different key from that of Veronese's art.
But if this had been Tiepolo's only or chief

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO 45

claim on our regard, he would count at best as
one of the most consummate scene-painters in sub-
ordination to architectural effect, whom modern
Europe has produced. His title to distinction is
not here.

The specific strength of Tiepolo as an artist
lay, I take it, in a peculiar and just perception of
certain atmospheric and colour qualities in his
Venetian birthplace ; the employment of which
for the realisation of very original and bold
conceptions placed him in advance not only of
Veronese, but also of all his contemporaries.
He is the true Italian pioneer of the most mo-
dern aims and sentiments in painting. Tiepolo,
in spite of his barocco decorative schemes, his
frigid allegories and conventional " machines,"
was a plein air master in a sense of this
term, which is wholly inapplicable to men like
Guardi, Canaletto, Longhi. I do not mean to
assert that he actually worked in the open air,
or that he struggled consciously with those
problems of values and relations, which tax the
energies of recent naturalistic painters. His
originality consisted in the fact, that he seems to
have been aware of the imminence of a radical
change in art-principles, and in the effort to
bring plein air into the studio, where hitherto a
conventional scheme of light and colour held
undisputed sway. His key of colour, wonder-

46 ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO

fully clear and luminous, is settled by the
harmonies between weather-mellowed marble,
light blue sky, russet or ochre-tinted sails, vivid
vegetable greens, sunburnt faces, and patches of
bright hues in the costume of sailors and the
common people, all subdued and softened by the
pearly haze " of moisture bred," which bathes
Venetian landscape in the warmth of early
summer. Gazing down the Zattere, along the
fagade of S. Maria del Rosario, with the
cypress-spires and creepers of the Dolgorouki
garden for foreground, and a group of fishing
boats in middle distance ; these objects forming
as it were an episode in the great poem of the
wide-spreading canal of the Giudecca, arched
over by illimitable light-irradiated heavens —
taking then this point of vision on a June
morning about ten, when the sun is already high
above the horizon, we enter into the region of
Tiepolo's artistic sympathies. He caught this
aspect of his sea-girt home : and being a sincere
and scientific draughtsman, he was able to place
the figures of his pictures with perfect relief of
modelling, in right aerial perspective, and with
exact relative tone-values, in the midst of a
liquid, luminous, translucent atmosphere. When
he is painting at his best, not to order, but con
amore, we do not feel, as we always feel witk
Titian and Veronese, that the pictorial schem*

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO 47

has been settled for studio-lighting, with careful
adjustments of facts observed during the artist's
study of external nature. On the contrary, we
feel that he has detached and fixed for us a
fragment of the whole wide scene around him
and ourselves. In other words, Tiepolo breaks
the tradition, derived from mediaeval miniature
through fresco, of a conventional chiaroscuro and
a conventional system of decorative tinting.
The living rapport which exists in nature
between colour, light and atmosphere, is felt and
reproduced by him.

I might illustrate these remarks by the famous
oil-painting of Christ's Ascent to Calvary, now
on view in the cast-room of the Accademia.
But I prefer to take for my example a smaller
canvas exhibited upon an easel beside this large
one, which seems to epitomise the qualities of
style on which I am insisting.*

It is a tall and narrow canvas, divided, after
old Venetian custom, into two almost equal sec-
tions ; the upper portion being occupied with
sky and architecture, the lower with a group of
figures in which the subject-interest of the com-
position concentrates. On the marble pavement
of the palace, in the open air, kneels a female

* The picture has been lately replaced in the Church
of the Apostoli, where it is very badly lighted.

48 ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO

saint supported by pra}'ing women, and backed
by mundane figures — a hard-featured old man,
a dainty page, and so forth. The saint, whose
head and flowing fair hair is surrounded with
an opalescent aureole, like greenish water of the
lagoon flashed through with silvery sunbeams,
kneels in an attitude of physical prostration.
She is clearly dying, parting her lips languidly
to receive the sacred wafer from the hand of a
ministering priest in cope and full canonicals.
He bends down to her, just as the priest bends
in Domenichino's Communion of S. Jerome. An
acolyte, kneeling and raising a lighted candle,
supports this sacerdotal dignitary in his heavy
robes of celebration. And thus two principal
masses are formed for the group : the one deter-
mined by the dying saint, the other by the
ministrant priest. They are connected, and
carried into combination with the architecture
and the sky by a gorgeously attired ecclesiastic
with white hair, who stands erect between the
two figure-masses and controls the colour scheme
of the composition. In this man's robes a richly-
glowing but subdued ochre, like gold dulled and
smouldering, predominates. The saint, at his
side, below him, is clothed in white, all the
shades and semitones of which have been worked
with greens and yellows and faint suggestions
of greyish blues. It may be said at once that,

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO 49

although at a distance the chromatic scheme
seems singularly decisive and vigorous, yet on
inspection it is impossible to discover any pure
or simple hue in any portion of the picture.
That plein air effect at which I think Tiepolo was
aiming, is gained by the most subtle and adroit
interworking of tint with tint ; not any one of
the dominant hues (except in the very highest
lights) being allowed to assert its own unmodified
quality. The hair of the bending priest, for
instance, looks black at a certain distance. Yet
it is almost entirely painted in strokes of bright
blue upon a dark ground.

Examining the group of figures, in order to
understand the subject of this altar-piece, we find
that the saint is a woman of exquisite and natural
beauty, a lily of whiteness, a princess of dignity
and grace. The ashen pallor of her face shows
that she has suffered some sudden and terrible
shock to her vital system ; and on her exquisite
pure throat there is just one little stain of crimson,
indicating blood. The heavy bluish lids droop
downward to her ivory cheeks ; and as we gaze
intently, we seem to feel that they cover no eyes,
but only empty orbits. This impression is so
vaguely, so tenderly communicated, that at first
I rebuked my fancy for having trespassed on
some region of unimaginable horror, which existed
not in the manly painter's mind, but in my own

D

50 ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO

too curious imagination. Then I perceived upon
a step below the marble platform where the saint
is kneeling, a silver plate with two eyes placed
upon it, and by the side thereof a bloody stiletto.
It seemed, then, that the pity and terror I had
taken from those drooping eyelids were not
fanciful ; and I christened the picture (whether
rightly or wrongly I do not know, for it is not
catalogued) by the title of " The Last Communion
of S. Lucy."

In addition to his other qualities, Tiepolo
painted like a great gentleman. There is an
unmistakable note of good breeding in all his
work. I do not remember to have ever found
him vulgar, brutal, or bourgeois. And here,
where he skirted the very border of the abyss of
physical torment, he avoids the clumsy symbolism
of mediaeval painters — jocund women carrying
their eyes or bleeding breasts on plates : he
avoids the butcherly abominations of Italian or
Flemish or French naturalists — Carravaggio's
flayings, Rubens's flakes of spear-divided flesh
with blood and water gushing from a gaping
wound, Poussin's bowels wound like ropes on
capstans by brawny varlets. Tiepolo shows
proper respect for the reality of his subject, to-
gether with noble breeding and a fine sense for
the limits of art, by creating a thing of beauty,
which, when examined a la loupe, betrays a

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO 51

tragic content, but does not force this in any
painful way upon attention. Lovers of what is
beautiful in art need not dwell upon the cruel
details of the subject-matter. The picture itself
suffices to give pleasure by its harmonies of
wisely ordered lines and colours melting in a
blaze of softened lustre.

The subject in a work of art like this counts
for little ; and we ought to be grateful to Tiepolo
for combining so much dramatic force with such
dignity in his treatment of a distressing motive.
The leading motive is sufficiently suggested, but
feelingly subordinated to those higher purposes
of elevated pleasure for which the fine arts were
created. Studying this picture, I arrive at the
conclusion that Tiepolo solved a very difficult art-
problem more successfully than almost any of his
predecessors, and than most of their successors.
Mediaeval painters, such for example as Perugino,
treated S. Lucy on the lines of the missal and
the miniature, detaching a central symbolic
motive and enlarging it. They served art by
making this expansion of the technically deve-
loped themes agreeable to our sense of line and
tint, without attempting to deal with the real
aspects of the world, and without engaging in
the strife with dramatic realism. Later masters
emancipated the motive from its mediaeval barren-
ness and infantile suggestion ; they sought to

52 ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TJEPOLO

evoke sensation by crude and violent exhibitions
of nerve-torturing martyrdom, as when Sebastian
del Piombo, in a picture at the Pitti, exposed
S. Apollonia with bared breasts and two execu-
tioners preparing to snip her nipples off with
iron pincers. Few, at this epoch, succeeded in
creating a vision of adorable beauty with all the
anguish of pain expressed in it ; as Sodoma once
did when he painted the pallid S. Sebastian ot
the Uffizi. But then comes Tiepolo, with more
of realistic action, with far finer suggestions,
with a firmer touch upon the supreme point in
the saint's crucifixion ; and yet without the
slightest mediaeval frigidity, without a hint of
brutal and disgusting realism. When it is
treated in this way, we can quit the subject, and
ascend into regions of pure art, where the bare
subject serves as a theme. The final meaning
of Tiepolo's work lies in its interpretation of a
world delightful to our senses by lines and hues,
naturally derived from the great source of uni-
versal beauty : form, and stuff, and substance,
flooded by the light of day ; things closest to
our senses, yet capable of subtlest transformation
at the poet-artist's bidding.

This little picture, then, which I have chosen
for my text, is a miracle of all perfections in the
painter's craft. Within a narrow space the
master has played with architectural perspective,

ON AN ALTAR-PIECE BY TIEPOLO 53

with atmosphere, with consummate drawing of the
human form, with cunning composition ; and
these essentials of art he has used as preludes to
the revel of his light and colour sense. When
the details have been keenly scrutinised and
studied, we return to the first impression made
upon us by the first sight of the canvas. Its
marvellous luminosity : its multiplication of low-
toned colours in a scheme of yellow and green,
delicately heightened by audacious flakes of red
(as on the jewel of S. Lucy's bosom), and
turquoise blue, and crimson (in the page's jacket),
and blots of acqua-marina — gemmily imposed
upon the thick impasto of the dominant ochres,
and flooded with light in which the melody of
tone throbs and quivers.

A critic of art, a describer, finds no words to
communicate the passion of a picture so exalted
by its maker's vivid grasp upon the beauty of
the world he felt so keenly in one aspect of its
many-sided fascination.

It is impossible that another Tiepolo should be
born again : one who preserved the great Italian
tradition, the solemn cantilena of the Venetian
religious style ; transforming this at the touch of
his magician's wand into something which the
newest schools can recognise as breathed upon
by the spirit they obey.

THE DANTESQUE AND PLATONIC
IDEALS OF LOVE

THE sexcentenary of Beatrice Portinari, which
was celebrated two years ago at Florence, com-
pelled the student of Dante's life and writings once
more to consider the relation of the poet to his
lady. Are we to accept as truths of history the
facts related by Boccaccio — namely, that Dante's
father took him at the age of nine to a May-day
feast in the house of Folco Portinari, and that
there he beheld Beatrice, the daughter of his
host, for the first time ? " She was a child of
eight then," says Boccaccio, " more fit to be an
angel than a girl." Are we to accept the
incidents of the " Vita Nuova " literally ? In
that record of his earliest life experience, Dante
says that love on this occasion took possession
of his soul, and that henceforth he worshipped
Beatrice, till the day of her death, with steadfast
silent adoration. To see her pass upon the

56 IDEALS OF LOVE

streets, to receive her salutation, to sympathise
with her at a distance in her joys and griefs,
sufficed to keep the flame of spiritual passion
alive in his heart, until that day in the year
1 290, six centuries ago, when " the Lord of
Justice called my most gracious lady to be glo-
rious beneath the banner of that blessed Queen
Mary whose name was always of greatest
reverence in the words of saintly Beatrice."
It does not appear from anything he tells us of
his youthful years that they conversed together ;
and of love in the common acceptation of that
term it is clear there was no question. Are we
then to believe that the inspiring lady of the
Convito, who typifies philosophy, that the Bea-
trice of the Paradise, who is certainly Divine
Wisdom, was still this same daughter of Folco
Portinari ? During those years of severe studies,
of political activity, of exile, after his marriage
and the birth of several children, did Dante still
cherish the memory of Beatrice, whom he had
worshipped at a distance from his tenth to his
twenty-fifth year ? How are we to explain the
fact, that a love, so immaterial, so visionary, be*
gotten in the tender days of childhood, and fed
with aliment so unsubstantial, exercised this en-
during influence over a man of Dante's stamp —
severe, precise, logical, austerely loyal to truth
as he conceived it ?

IDEALS OF LOVE 57

In short, was Beatrice a woman ? Or was
she, as a certain school of commentators (start-
ing with Gian Maria Filelfo, and represented in
this century by the elder Rossetti, by Barlow, by
Tomlinson, and others) would have us imagine —
was she an ideal, an allegory ?

For my own part I cannot reject the authority
of Dante's contemporaries, Boccaccio and Villani,
who believed in the literal meaning of the " Vita
Nuova." I cannot doubt the accent of veracity
in that book of youthful love. I cannot put out
of sight the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti, in which
the poet, assuming for once a tone of familiarity
and daily life, speaks of his lady as one whose
presence in the flesh might give complete and
innocent joy to her lover. The mistrust in the
reality of Beatrice seems to me to have arisen
partly from the false note struck by Boccaccio,
and partly from Dante's own mystical habit of
mind. Boccaccio could not comprehend the pe-
culiar nature of chivalrous passion as it existed
in natures more metaphysical than his own.
And Dante from the very beginning, in his
language about love, in his idealisation of the
woman whom he loved, introduced an element of
allegory. Even in the "Vita Nuova" she is not
merely a beautiful and gracious girl, but a
spiritual being, round whom his highest and
deepest thoughts spontaneously crystallise. She

58 IDEALS OF LOVE

is the living ensign of a power more potent than
herself, of something vital in the universe for
Dante ; of Love, in fact, which for her lover
included all his noblest impulses and purest
strivings after the ideal life. Early in his boy-
hood he formed this habit of regarding Beatrice ;
and after her death, in spite of all temporal
changes, the habit was continued ; so that at last
she became in fact what critics of the allegorical
interpretation wish to believe she always had
been — a symbol. Still, even to the last, even
in the pageant of the Purgatory and the ascent
through Paradise, Beatrice retains a portion of
her original womanhood. She is never wholly
transmuted into allegory.

It is only by adhering steadily to these con-
ceptions— to the thought of Beatrice as a real
woman, whom Dante really selected to love after
the singular fashion of his age ; and to the
thought of her submitted to an allegorising pro-
cess from the earliest in her lover's mind — that
we can arrive at sound critical conclusions on
this problem. Our main difficulty is to throw
ourselves back by sympathy and intelligence into
the mood of emotion which made the poet's
attitude possible. In other words, we have to
try to comprehend that very peculiar form of
philosophical enthusiasm which the chivalrous
love of mediaeval Christendom assumed in Italy.

IDEALS OF LOVE 59

In the case of Dante, this presents itself to
our imagination under conditions of almost in-
superable unintelligibility, owing to the specific
qualities of his unique genius. The other poets
of his period, Cino, Guido Guinicelli, Guido
Cavalcanti, afterwards Petrarch, approached love
from the same points of view — of mysticism,
allegory, metaphysical interpretation — each, ac-
cording to his character and temperament, blend-
ing the memory of the woman who had stirred
passion in his soul with those aspiring thoughts
and exalted emotions which were then considered
to be the natural offspring of respectful love,
until the woman disappeared in an incense-cloud
of adoration, vanished in a labyrinth of philo-
sophical abstractions. This, so to speak, was
the method of that school of poetry which,
transmitted from Provence through Sicily, took
upon itself a new character of intellectual subtlety
at Florence and Bologna. But Dante, while he
followed the method, displayed the inevitable
qualities of his marked personality. We have to
deal with no mere lyrist and schoolman, such as
Guido Cavalcanti was. Dante is over and above
all the singer of the Divine Comedy, the poet of
stirring dramatic passages, of concrete images, of
firm grasp on all external and internal facts.
The realistic veracity of his genius applied to the
delineation of an actual emotion so spiritual as

60 IDEALS OF LOVE

that of his for Beatrice, has misled people into
thinking that he cannot be telling the truth.
There are strains of feeling so ethereal and im-
palpable (as there are qualities of pitch in sound
so fine) that the ordinary sense does not perceive
them. Dante, in the "Vita Nuova" and the
" Rime," expresses such a feeling ; and he
further complicates our difficulty by doing so to
a great extent indirectly, employing the method
of his school, allegorising, transmuting love-
thoughts into metaphysical conceptions, con-
founding the simple propositions of a natural
emotion with the corollaries from those pro-
positions in the lover's mind. Beatrice is not
only Beatrice, Portinari's daughter and Simone's
wife. She is also all that the poet-philosopher
learned and saw and loved of beautiful or good
or true ; the whole of which, as springing from
her influence, he carries to her credit, and wor-
ships under her sign and symbol.

This, I repeat, is a difficult attitude of mind
for us modern men, with our positive conceptions,
to assimilate. In order to approach the task
more easily, it may be well to consider another
type of amorous enthusiasm which once flourished
in the world for a short season, and which also
assumed the philosophical mantle. I allude to
that specific type of Greek love which Plato
expounds in the " Phaedrus " and " Symposium."

IDEALS OF LOVE 6t

Greek love and chivalrous love form two extra-
ordinary and exceptional phases of psychological
experience. By comparing them in their points
of similarity and points of difference, we may
come to understand more of that peculiar
enthusiasm which they possessed in common,
which made love in either case a ladder for
scaling the higher fortresses of intellectual truth,
and which it is now well-nigh impossible for us
to realise as actual.

II

In order to understand the Platonic and the
Florentine enthusiasm, the love of the " Sym-
posium" and the love of the " Vita Nuova," we
must begin by studying the conditions under
which they were severally elaborated.

Platonic love, in the true sense of that phrase,
was the affection of a man for a man ; and it
grew out of antecedent customs which had
obtained from very distant times in Hellas.
Homer excludes this emotion from his picture of
society in the heroic age. The tale of Patroclus
and Achilles in the " Iliad " does not suggest the
interpretation put on it by later generations ; and
the legend of Ganymede is related without a hint
of personal desire. It has therefore been

62 IDEALS OF LOVE

assumed that what is called Greek love was
unknown at the time when the Homeric poems
were composed. This argument, however, is not
conclusive ; for Homer, in his theology, sup-
pressed the darker and cruder elements of Greek
religion, which certainly survived from ancient
savagery, and which prevailed long after the
supposed age of those poems. An eclectic spirit
of refinement presided over the redaction of the
"Iliad" and the "Odyssey"; and the other
omission I have mentioned may possibly be due
to the same cause. The orator ^Eschines, in his
critique of the Achilleian story, adopts this
explanation. Unhappily for the science of com-
parative literature, we have lost the Cyclic poems.
But there is reason to believe that these contained
direct allusions to the passion in question.
Otherwise, ^Eschylus, the conservative, and
Sophocles, the temperate, would hardly have
written tragedies (the " Myrmidons " and the
"Lovers of Achilles") which brought Greek
love upon the Attic stage. If the " Iliad " had
been his sole authority, ^Eschylus could not have
made Achilles burst forth into that cry of
" unhusbanded grief" over the corpse of his
dead comrade, which Lucian and Athenseus have
preserved for us.

However this may be, masculine love, as the
Greeks called it, appeared at an early age in

IDEALS OF LOVE 63

Hellas. We find it localised in several places,
and consecrated by divers legends of the gods.
Yet none of the later Greeks could give a distinct
account of its origin or importation. There are
critical grounds for supposing that the Dorians
developed this custom in their native mountains
(the home of Achilles and the region where it
still survives), and that they carried it upon their
migration to Peloponnesus. At any rate, in
Crete and Sparta, it speedily became a social
institution, regulated by definite laws and
sanctioned by the State. In each country a
youth who had no suitor lost in public estima-
tion. The elder, in these unions of friends,
received the name of " inspirer" or " lover," the
younger that of " hearer " or " admired." When
the youth grew up and went to battle with his
comrade, he assumed the title of bystander in
the ranks. I have not space to dwell upon the
minute laws and customs by which Dorian love
was governed. Suffice it to say that in all of
them we discern the intention of promoting a
martial spirit in the population, securing a manly
education for the young, and binding the male
members of the nation together by bonds of
mutual affection. In earlier times at least care
was taken to secure the virtues of loyalty, self-
respect, and permanence in these relations. In
short, masculine love constituted the chivalry of

64 IDEALS OF LOVE

primitive Hellas, the stimulating and exalting
enthusiasm of her sons. It did not exclude
marriage, nor had it the effect of lowering the
position of women in society, since it is notorious
that in those Dorian States where the love of
comrades became an institution, women received
more public honour and enjoyed fuller liberty and
power over property than elsewhere.

The military and chivalrous nature of Greek
love is proved by the myths and more or less
historical legends which idealised its virtues.
Herakles, the Dorian demigod, typified by his
affection for young men and by his unselfish
devotion to humanity what the Spartan and
Cretan warriors demanded from this emotion.
The friendships of Theseus and Peirithous, of
Orestes and Pylades, of Damon and Pythias,
comrades in arms and faithful to each other to
the death, embalmed the memory of lives en-
nobled by masculine affection. Nearly every
city had some tale to tell of emancipation from
tyranny, of prudent legislation, or of heroic
achievements in war, inspired by the erotic
enthusiasm. When Athens laboured under a
grievous curse and pestilence, two lovers, Cratinus
and Aristodemus, devoted their lives to the
salvation of the city. Two lovers, Harmodius
and Aristogeiton, shook off the bondage of the
Peisistratidae. Philolaus and Diocles gave laws

IDEALS OF LOVE 65

to Thebes. Another Diodes won everlasting
glory in a fight at Megara. Chariton and
Melanippus resisted the tyranny of Phalaris at
Agrigentum. Cleomachus, inspired by passion,
restored freedom to the town of Chalkis. All
these men were lovers of the Greek type.
Tyrants, says an interlocutor in one of Plato's
dialogues, tremble before lovers. Glorying in
their emotion, the Greeks pronounced it to be the
crowning virtue of free men, the source of gentle
and heroic actions, the heirloom of Hellenic
civilisation, in which barbarians and slaves had
and could have no part or lot. The chivalry of
which I am speaking powerfully influenced Greek
history. All the Spartan kings and generals grew
up under the institution of Dorian comradeship.
Epameinondas and Alexander were notable lovers ;
and the names of their comrades are recorded.
When Greek liberty expired upon the Plain of
Chaeronea, the Sacred Band of Thebans, all of
whom were lovers, fell dead to a man ; and
Philip wept as he beheld their corpses, crying
aloud : " Perish the man who thinks that these
men either did or suffered what is shameful."
It powerfully influenced Greek art. Pindar and
Sophocles were lovers ; Pindar died in the arms
of Theoxenos, whose praise he sang in the
Skolion of which we have a characteristic frag-
ment. Pheidias carved the name of his beloved

66 IDEALS OF LOVE

Pantarkes on the chryselephantine statue of
Olympian Zeus. ^Eschylus, as we have seen,
wrote one of his most popular tragedies upon
the affection of Achilles for Patroclus. Solon,
Demosthenes, ^Eschines, among statesmen and
orators, made no secret of a feeling which they
regarded as the highest joy in life and the source
of exalted enthusiasm.

Greek love, as I have shown, was in its origin
and essence masculine, military, chivalrous.
However repugnant to modern taste may be the
bare fact that this passion existed and flourished
in the highest-gifted of all races, yet it was
clearly neither an effeminate depravity nor a
sensual vice. Still such an emotion, being ab-
normal, could not prevail and dominate the
customs of a whole nation without grave draw-
backs. Very close to the chivalry of Hellas
lurked a formidable social evil, just as adultery
was intertwined with the chivalry of mediaeval
Europe. Adultery was not occasionally, but
so to speak continually, mixed up with the
feudal love de par amour. One ingenious writer,
Vernon Lee, even maintains that adultery was
the very ground on which that love flourished.
In like manner, another immorality was, not
occasionally, but continually mixed up with Greek
love, was the soil on which it flourished. There-
fore in those States especially, like Athens, where

IDEALS OF LOVE 67

the love in question had not been moralised by
prescribed laws, did it tend to degenerate. And
it was just here, at Athens, that it received the
metaphysical idealisation which justifies us in
comparing it to the Italian form of mediaeval
chivalry. Socrates, says Maximus Tyrius, pity-
ing the state of young men, and wishing to raise
their affections from the mire into which they
were declining, opened a way for the salvation of
their souls through the very love they then
abused. Whether Socrates was really actuated
by these motives, cannot be affirmed with cer-
tainty. At any rate, he handled masculine love
with robust originality, and prepared the path
for Plato's philosophical conception of passion
as an inspiration leading men to the divine
idea.

I have observed that in Dorian chivalry the
lover was called " inspirer," and the beloved
" hearer." It was the man's duty to instruct the
lad in manners, feats of arms, trials of strength
and music. This relation of the elder to the
younger is still assumed to exist by Plato. But
he modifies it in a way peculiar to himself,
upon the consideration of which I must now
enter, since we have reached the very point of
contact between Plato's and Dante's enthusiasm.

Socrates, as interpreted in the Platonic dia-
logues entitled " Phaedrus " and " Symposium,"

68 IDEALS OF LOVE

sought to direct and elevate a moral force, an
enthusiasm, an exaltation of the emotions, which
already existed as the highest form of feeling in
the Greek race. In the earlier of those dialogues
he describes the love of man for youth as a
madness, or divine frenzy, not different in quality
from that which inspires prophets and poets.
The soul he compares to a charioteer guiding
a pair of winged horses, the one of noble, the
other of ignoble breed. Under this metaphor
is veiled the psychological distinctions of reason,
generous impulse, and carnal appetite. Com-
posed of these triple elements, the soul has
shared in former lives the company of gods, and
has gazed on beauty, wisdom, and goodness, the
three most eminent manifestations of the divine,
in their pure essence. But, sooner or later,
during the course of her celestial wanderings,
the soul is dragged to earth by the baseness of
the carnal steed. She enters a form of flesh,
and loses the pinions which enabled her to soar.
Yet even in her mundane life (that obscure and
confused state of existence which Plato else-
where compares to a dark cave visited only by
shadows of reality) she may be reminded of the
heavenly place from which she fell, and of the
glorious visions of divinity she there enjoyed.
No mortal senses, indeed, could bear the sight
of truth or goodness or beauty in their undimmed

IDEALS OF LOVE 69

splendour. Yet earthly things in which truth,
goodness, and beauty are incarnate, touch the
soul to adoration, stimulate the growth of her
wings, and set her on the upward path whereby
she will revert to God. The lover has this
opportunity when he beholds the person who
awakes his passion ; for the human body is of
all earthly things that in which real beauty shines
most clearly. When Plato proceeds to say that
"philosophy in combination with affection for
young men " is the surest method for attaining
to the higher spiritual life, he takes for granted
that reason, recognising the divine essence of
beauty, encouraging the generous impulses of
the heart, curbing the carnal appetite, converts
the mania of love into an instrument of edifica-
tion. Passionate friends, bound together in the
chains of close yet temperate comradeship, seek-
ing always to advance in wisdom, self-restraint,
and intellectual illumination, prepare themselves
for the celestial journey. "When the end
comes, they are light and ready to fly away,
having conquered in one of the three heavenly
or truly Olympian victories. Nor can human
discipline or divine inspiration confer any greater
blessing on man than this." Moreover, even
should they decline toward sensuality and taste
those pleasures on which the vulgar set great
store, they, too, will pass from life, " unwinged

70 IDEALS OF LOVE

indeed, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no
mean reward of love and madness."

The doctrine of the " Symposium " is not
different, except that here Socrates, professing to
report the teaching of a wise woman Diotima,
assumes a loftier tone, and attempts a sublimer
flight. Love, he says, is the child of Poverty
and Contrivance, deriving something from both
his father and his mother. He lacks all things,
and has the wit to gain all things. Love too,
when touched by beauty, desires to procreate ;
and if the mortal lover be one whose body alone
is creative, he betakes himself to woman and
begets children ; but if the soul be the chief
creative principle in the lover's nature, then he
turns to young men of " fair and noble and well-
nurtured spirit," and in them begets the immortal
progeny of high thoughts and generous emotions.
The same divine frenzy of love, which forms the
subject of the " Phaedrus," is here again treated as
the motive force which starts the soul upon her
journey towards the region of essential truth.
Attracted by what is beautiful, the lover first
dedicates himself to one youth in whom beauty
is apparent ; next he is led to perceive that
beauty in all fair forms is a single quality ; he
then passes to the conviction that intellectual is
superior to physical beauty ; and so by degrees
he attains the vision of a single science, which

IDEALS OF LOVE 71

is the science of beauty everywhere, or the wor-
ship of the divine under one of its three main
attributes.

The lesson which both of these Socratic dia-
logues seem intended to inculcate, may be
summed up thus. Love, like poetry and pro-
phecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from
the common current of their earthly lives ; and
in the right use of this gift lies the secret of all
human excellence. The passion which grovels
in the filth of sensual grossness may be trans-
formed into a glorious enthusiasm, a winged
splendour, capable of rising to the contemplation
of eternal verities and reuniting the soul of man
to God. How strange will it be, when once
those heights of intellectual intuition have been
scaled, to look down again on earth and view
the human being in whom the spirit first recog-
nised the essence of beauty.

There is a deeply rooted mysticism, an im-
penetrable Soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of
Er6s. And it must be borne in mind that the
love of women is rigidly and expressly excluded
from the scheme. The soul which has attained
to the highest possible form of perfection in this
life, is defined by Plato (" Pheedr." 249, A.), to
be " the soul of one who has followed philosophy
with flawless self-devotion, or who has combined
his passion for young men with the pursuit of

72 IDEALS OF LOVE

truth." These are the essential conditions of
Platonic love ; and they are so strange that Lucian,
Epicurus, Cicero, and Gibbon may be pardoned
for sneering at " the thin device of virtue and
friendship which amused the philosophers of
Athens," just as in modern times the purity of
chivalrous love has been almost universally sus-
pected.

Ill

It is not needful to describe the conditions
of mediaeval chivalry with great particularity of
detail. They are better known than the condi-
tions of Greek chivalry ; and the enthusiastic love
which sprang from them, though little under-
stood, is regarded by common consent as legiti-
mate and beneficial to society.

Chivalry must not be confounded with the
feudalism out of which it emerged. It was an
ideal, binding men together by common spiritual
enthusiasms. We find the ground material of
the chivalrous virtues in the Teutonic character.
As described by Tacitus, the German races were
distinguished for chastity, obedience to self-
imposed laws, truth, loyalty, regard for honour
more than gain, and a reverence for women
amounting to idolatry. These qualities furnished
a proper soil for the chivalrous emotions ; and

IDEALS OF LOVE 73

the chivalrous investiture, whereby the young
knight was consecrated to a noble life, can also
be derived from Teutonic customs. " They
decorate their youthful warriors with the shield
and spear," says Tacitus, insisting on the sacred
obligation which this ceremony imposed. Chi-
valry would, however, scarcely have assumed
the form it did in the twelfth century but for the
slowly refining influences of Christianity. In
the epics of the Niblung Cycle, and in the
song of Roland, there are but faint traces of its
subtler spirit. The unselfishness of the true
knight, his humility and obedience, his devotion
to the service of the weak and helpless, his
inspiration by ideals, his readiness to forgive and
to show mercy — in fact, what we may call his
charity in armour — sprang from Christianity. It
is only in the later romances of King Arthur
that these essential elements of the chivalrous
spirit make themselves manifest.

" As for death," says a knight of the Round
Table, " be he welcome when he cometh ; but
my oath and my honour, the adventure that
hath fallen to me, and the love of my lady, I will
lose them not."

This sentence, in a few words, expresses the
attitude of a chivalrous gentleman. When
King Arthur established his knights in a solemn
chapter at the Court of Camelot, he " charged

74 IDEALS OF LOVE

them never to do outrage nor murder, and
alway to flee treason ; also by no means to be
cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asked
mercy, upon pain of forfeiture of their worship
and lordship of King Arthur for evermore ; and
always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen
succour upon pain of death. Also that no man
take no battles in a wrong quarrel for no law,
nor for worldly goods." The knights, both old
and young, swore to these articles ; and every
year they took the oath again at the high feast
of Pentecost.

As the Christian religion in general exercised
a decisive influence in the formation of chivalry,
so we may perhaps connect the peculiar mode
of amorous enthusiasm which characterised this
ideal with the worship of the maiden mother of
Christ. Woman had been exalted to the throne
of heaven ; and it was not unnatural that woman
should become an object of almost religious
adoration upon earth. The names of God and
of his lady were united on the lips of a true
knight ; for the motto of chivalry in its best
period was " Dieu et ma Dame." Love came to
be regarded as the source of all nobility, virtue,
heroism, and self-sacrifice. " A knight may
never be of prowess," says Sir Tristram, " but if
he be a lover." This language precisely corre-
sponds with the language of the Greeks regarding

IDEALS OF LOVE 75

that other love of theirs, which nerved them for
deeds of prowess, for the overthrow of tyrants,
and the liberation of their fatherland.

Chivalrous love was wholly extra-nuptial and
anti-matrimonial. The lady whom the knight
adored and served, who received his service and
rewarded his devotion, could never be his wife.
She might be a maiden or a married woman ; in
practice she was almost invariably the latter.
But the love which united the two in bonds more
firm than any other, was incompatible with mar-
riage. The feudal courts of love in fact pro-
claimed that " between two married persons,
Love cannot exert his powers." This is a
peculiarity well worthy of notice. Not only does
it at once and for ever set an end to those foolish
questions which have sometimes been asked
about the reasons why Dante did not marry
Beatrice ; it also constitutes one of the strongest
points of similarity between the chivalrous love
of the ancient Greeks and that of the mediaeval
races. Plato, in the " Symposium," it will be
remembered, asserts that the exalted love on
which he is discoursing has nothing whatever to
do with the " vulgar and trivial " way of matri-
mony. It must be excited by a person with
whom connubial relations are absolutely impos-
sible. It is a state of the soul, not an appetite ;
and though the weakness of mortality may lead

76 IDEALS OF LOVE

lovers into sensuality, such shortcomings form a
distinct deviation from the ideal. Least of all
can it have anything to do with those connections
profitable to the State and useful to society,
which involve the procreation and rearing of
children, domestic cares, and the commonplace
of daily duties. In theory, at any rate, both
Greek and mediaeval types of chivalrous emotion
were pure and spiritual enthusiasms, purging the
lover's soul of all base thoughts, lifting him
above the bondage of the flesh, and filling him
with a continual rapture.

Plato called love a " mania," an inspired
frenzy. Among the chivalrous lovers of Pro-
vence, this high rapture received the name of
" Joy-" I* will here be remembered by students
of the " Morte Darthur " that the castle to which
both Lancelot and Tristram carried off their
ladies was Joyous Card. The fruits of joy were
bravery, courtesy, high spirit, sustained powers
of endurance, delight in perilous adventure.
The soul of the knight, penetrated with the fine
elixir of enthusiatic love, is ready to confront all
dangers, to undertake the most difficult tasks, to
bear obloquy and want, the scorn of men, mis-
understanding, even coldness and disdain on the
part of his lady, with serene sweetness and an
exalted patience. Plato's description of the
lover in the " Phsedrus " exactly squares with

IDEALS OF LOVE 77

this romantic ideal of the knight's enthusiasm.
The permanent emotion, whether termed
"mania" or "joy," is precisely the same in
quality ; and whether the object which stirred it
was a young man as in Greece, or a married
woman as in mediaeval Europe, signified nothing.

Chivalrous love, under both its forms, did not
exclude marriage, except between the lovers
themselves. Lancelot and Tristram took wives,
while remaining loyal to Guinevere and Iseult,
their ladies. Dante had children by Gemma,
and Petrarch by a concubine. Still it was the
sainted Beatrice, the unattainable Laura, who
received the homage of these poets and inspired
their art.

In theory, then, chivalrous love of both types,
the Greek and the mediaeval, existed indepen-
dently of the marriage tie and free from sensual
affections. It was, in each case, the source of
exhilarating passion ; a durable ecstasy which
removed the lover to a higher region, rendering
him capable of haughty thoughts and valiant
deeds. Both loves were originally martial, and
connected with the military customs of the
peoples among whom they flourished. Both, in
practice and in course of time, fell below their
own ideal standards, without, however, losing
the high spirit, loyalty, and sense of honour,
which went far to compensate for what was

78 IDEALS OF LOVE

defective in their psychological basis. At the
same time, social evils of the gravest kind were
inseparable from both forms of enthusiastic
feeling, because each had striven to transcend the
sphere of natural duties and of normal instincts.
At this point, when feudal chivalry was
tending toward the travesty which is depicted
for us in " Little Jehan de Saintre"," the same
thing happened at Florence to its imaginative
essence as had previously happened to the imagi-
native essence of Greek chivalry at Athens. We
have seen that Greek love was originally a Dorian
and soldierly passion ; it had grown up in the
camp : and when it lost its primal quality in the
Attic circles, Socrates attempted to utilise the
force he recognised in this still romantic feeling
for the stimulation of a nobler intellectual life.
The moral energy was there. It throbs through
previous ages of Greek legend, literature, and
history. But a philosophical application of this
motive, which is the peculiar discovery of the
Platonic Socrates, had not been attempted.
That was reserved for the Athenians, and, in
particular, for the school of the Academy.
Precisely in like manner, chivalry, the fine but
scarcely wholesome flower of feudalism, the
super-subtle hybrid between savage Teutonic
virtues and hyper-sensitive Christian emotions,
which grew up in the mediaeval castle, had been

IDEALS OF LOVE 79

now transplanted to the classic soil of Italy.
Italy was neither feudal nor Teutonic ; and her
Christianity, for the highest of her sons, was
deeply penetrated with political and intellectual
ideas. The generous Tuscan spirits who
adopted chivalry, partly as a motive for their
art, and partly as a visionary guide in conduct
— Guido Guinicelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da
Pistoja, Lapo, Dante — enamoured of its beauty,
but unable to prolong its life upon the former
line of feudal institutions, lent it the new touch
of mystical philosophy. The simple substance
of the chivalrous enthusiasm, which had taken
gracious form in the legends of Lancelot and
Tristram, of Sir Beaumains and Sir Galahad,
was refined upon and spun into a web of
allegory. The subtleties and psychological
distinctions of the troubadours received meta-
physical interpretations. A nation of scholars
and of doctors, who were also artists — Dante
calls the poets of his school dottori — men who
were not knights or squires or mighty of their
hands, reformed, rehandled, and recast the
tradition of the love they had received from
militant subconscious predecessors. We come
thus to the remarkable fact that the last manifes-
tation of mediaeval love at Florence represents
an almost exact parallel to the last manifestation
of Greek love at Athens. In both instances, an

8o IDEALS OF LOVE

enthusiasm which had its root in human passion,
after passing through a martial phase of evolu-
tion and becoming a social factor of importance
in the raising of the race to higher spiritual
power, assumes the aspect of philosophy, and
connects itself with the effort of the intellect to
reach the Beatific Vision. Dante, conducted by
Beatrice into the circle of the Celestial Rose,
proclaims the same creed as Plato when he
asserts that the love of a single person, leading
the soul upon the way to truth, becomes the means
whereby man may ascend to the contemplation
of the divine under one of its eternal aspects.

What is really remarkable in the parallel I
have attempted to establish is, that the meta-
physical transformation of Greek " mania " and
mediaeval "joy," which was effected severally at
Athens and in Tuscany, took place in each case
by a natural and independent process of develop-
ment. We have no reason to suppose that
feudal chivalry owed anything to Platonic in-
fluences, even in this its latest manifestation. It
is certain, for instance, that Dante never read
the " Phaedrus " and the " Symposium " in the
originals ; and nothing shows that he was even
remotely acquainted with their true substance in
scholastic compendiums. The same exalted
psychological condition followed similar lines of
development, and reached the same result — a

IDEALS OF LOVE 81

result which in each case is almost unintelligible
to us who study it. We find the greatest diffi-
culty in believing that Socrates was sincere, and
that Dante was sincere. We turn, like Gibbon,
in our perplexity about Greek love to the hypo-
thesis of " a thin device of friendship and
virtue," masking gross immorality. We turn,
like the elder Rossetti and his school, in our
perplexity about Dante's idealisation of Beatrice,
to the hypothesis of a political or a theological
allegory. But sound criticism rejects both of
these hypotheses. Frankly admitting that Greek
love was tainted with a vice obnoxious to
modern notions, and that mediaeval love was
involved with adultery, the true critic will
declare that, strange and incomprehensible as
this must always seem, there were two brief
moments, once at Athens and once at Florence,
when amorous enthusiasms of an abnormal type
presented themselves to natures of the noblest
stamp as indispensable conditions of the pro-
gress of the soul upon the pathway toward
perfection.

IV

I have dwelt in this essay more upon the
similarity between Greek and mediaeval love
than on their difference. The identity of the

F

82 IDEALS OF LOVE

psychological phenomenon is what I had to
demonstrate. Yet each was distinguished by
characteristics which make it seem at first sight
the exact contrary of the other. The antique
Platonist, as appears from numerous passages
in the Platonic writings, would have despised
the Petrarchist as a vulgar woman-lover. The
Petrarchist would have loathed the Platonist as
a moral pariah. But, though the emotion
differed in external aspect, the spiritual quin-
tessence of it was the same. Romantic passion,
distilled through the alembic of philosophy, pro-
duced both at Athens and in Italy a rare and
singular exaltation, which only superficial ob-
servers will deny to have been one and the
same psychical condition.

The person of a beautiful youth led Plato's
Socrates to follow beauty through all its epi-
phanies until he arrived at the notion of the
universal beauty which is God. Dante, under
the influence of the love he felt for Beatrice,
advanced in knowledge till he grasped the divine
wisdom which he then symbolically identified
with the woman who had inspired him.

In addition to the radical divergence I have
here indicated — a divergence of moral sentiment
and social custom, which presents a curious
problem to the ethical inquirer — we have to
take into account the dominant conceptions of

IDEALS OF LOVE 83

the peoples who evolved this enthusiasm. Greek
religion was plastic, objective, anthropomorphic.
The Greeks thought of their deities as persons,
whose portraits could be carved in statues.
Mediaeval religion was spiritual, separating the
divinity man worshipped from corporeal form, so
far as this was compatible with the dogma of the
incarnation. Greek philosophy, in spite of its
occasional excursions into mysticism, remained
positive. Mediaeval philosophy eagerly embraced
allegory and "anagogical interpretations."

Who shall say whether the Platonic ideal
evolved from the old Greek chivalry of masculine
love was ever realised in actual existence ? The
healthy temper of the Attic mind made it difficult
for men to persuade themselves that such a state
of the soul was possible. But in Italy the
corresponding ideal evolved from the feudal
chivalry of woman-service found a more con-
genial soil to root in. The long travail of the
past ten centuries, the many maladies of scho-
lastic speculation, created a favourable intellectual
atmosphere. Saying one thing when you meant
another, clothing simple thoughts and natural
instincts with the veil of symbolism, drawing an
iridescent mirage of fancy over the surface of
fact by half-voluntary self-sophistications : all
this was alien to the frank Greek nature, familiar
to the subtleising minds of schoolmen. Accord-

84 IDEALS OF LOVE

ingly the Platonic conception of Greek love soon
revealed its unsubstantially, whereas the Dan-
tesque conception of feudal love allied itself to
the symbolising tendencies of the age in art and
letters, and to the hazy web-weavings of contem-
porary science. In Greece the Platonic ideal
was rudely disavowed by average men who
knew what lurked at the bottom of it. In
Europe the Dantesque ideal, though no one
doubted how perilously near it lay to adultery,
imposed for a certain time upon society. Dante,
as I have remarked before, in this, as in all
things, stood apart, sharing the tendencies of his
age in a general way only. His successors,
while they affected to carry on the tradition of
the Florentine amourists, practically reverted to
the unsophisticated emotions of common humanity.
Laura, in Petrarch's poems, is a very real though
not a very well-defined woman, and is loved by
him in a very natural manner. The climax of
Boccaccio's " Amorosa Visione," after all its
mysticism and allegorising, is the union of two
lovers in a voluptuous embrace.

What subsists of really vital and precious in
both ideals is the emotional root from which
they severally sprang : in Greece the love of
comrades, binding friends together, spurring
them on to heroic action, and to intellectual
pursuits in common ; in mediaeval Europe the

IDEALS OF LOVE 85

devotion to the female sex, through manly cour-
tesy, which raised the crudest of male appetites
to a higher value.

It would also be unjust, in treating of these
two ideas, to forget that the first awakening of
love in true and gentle natures is a psychological
moment of the utmost importance. The spiritual
life of a man has not unfrequently started from
this point, and his addiction to nobler aims has
been occasioned by the incidence of emotion.
The stimulating and quickening influence of
genuine love is a very real thing ; and if this
were all contained in the ideals we have been
comparing, no exception could be taken to them.
P. ut in both cases the psychological fact has been
strained beyond its power of tension ; and a
simple matter of experience has been made the
basis of a misleading mystical philosophy.

So then the attitude of Dante toward Beatrice
must, for all practical purposes, be judged as
sterile and ineffectual as the attitude assumed by
Plato toward young men, loved, according to
Greek custom, in the playing field or in the
groves of the Academy.

It is a delusion to imagine that the human
spirit is led to discover divine truths by amorous
enthusiasm for a fellow-creature, however refined
that impulse may be. The quagmires into which
those who follow such a, wiU-o'-the-wisp will

86 IDEALS OF LOVE

probably flounder are only too plainly illustrated
by the cynical remarks of Shelley upon Emilia
Viviani, written a few days after he had composed
the Platonic ravings of " Epipsychidion." Never-
theless, there are delusions, wandering fires of
the imaginative reason, which, for a brief period
of time, under special conditions, and in peculiarly
constituted natures, have become fruitful of real
and excellent results. This was the case, I take
it, with both Plato and Dante.

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

NOT long ago, a writer in The Artist quoted
some lines of remarkable dignity and beauty by
E. C. L. I felt that here was a poet unknown
to me ; for the verses had that peculiar quality
which belongs alone to genuine inspiration. By
the kindness of the editor of The Artist I obtained
a copy of the book from which the extracts
had been made. It is a thin volume, entitled
"Echoes from Theocritus, and Other Sonnets."
By Edward Cracroft Lefroy. London : Elliot
Stock, 1885. The first thirty sonnets are com-
posed on themes suggested by the Syracusan
idyllist. Of miscellaneous sonnets there are
seventy. So, whether by accident or intention,
the poet rests his fame upon a century of sonnets,
by far the most important of these being the
seventy which do not give their title to the book.
Together with this volume came the sad intel-

88 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

ligence that Edward Lefroy died last summei
after a tedious illness. In reply to inquiries, I
learned, through the courtesy of his best and
oldest friend, that he was educated at Blackheath
Proprietary School and at Keble College, Oxford.
In 1878 he took orders. His sonnets originally
appeared in three small paper-covered pamphlets,
severally entitled " Echoes from Theocritus,"
" Cytisus and Galingale," " Sketches and Studies."
They were published at Blackheath by H. Burn-
side, bookseller, between the years 1883 and
1884, and attracted comparatively little notice.
In 1885 tne same sonnets were collected under
the title and description I have given above.
Few of our well-known literary critics, with the
exception of Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. William
Sharp, took notice of them and discerned their
merit. Later on, Mr. Lefroy gave a volume of
sermons to the public, and in 1885 he printed a
very characteristic collection of " Addresses to
Senior School-boys." He was thirty-five years
of age when he died.

Though Mr. Lefroy worked as a parish clergy-
man both at Truro and Lambeth with the late
and the present Archbishops of Canterbury, he
suffered from chronic physical weakness of a dis-
tressing nature. As early as the year 1882, he
learned from the best medical authority that his
heart; was seriously affected, and. that he cquld

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 89

not expect length of life. The pains and weari-
nesses of illness he bore with what a critic,
writing in the Academy, well described as
" breezy healthfulness of thought and feeling."
Combining in a singular measure Hellenic cheer-
fulness with Christian faith and patience, he was
able to await death with a spiritual serenity
sweeter than the steadfastness of Stoical endur-
ance. In one of his diaries he wrote : " The
world contains, even for an invalid like me, a
multitude of beautiful and inspiring things.
.... I have always tried to live a broad life.
It has been my pleasure to sympathise with all
sorts and conditions of men in their labours and
their recreations. Art, nature, and youth have
yielded to me ' the harvest of a quiet eye.' It
would be affectation to pretend that I am weary
of existence .... but I have faith enough in
my Lord to follow Him willingly where He has
gone before." His sympathy with youthful
strength and beauty, his keen interest in boyish
games and the athletic sports of young men,
seem to have kept his nature always fresh and
wholesome. These qualities were connected in a
remarkable way with Hellenic instincts and an
almost pagan delight in nature. But Lefroy's
temperament assimilated from the Christian and
the Greek ideals only what is really admirable in
both : discarding the asceticism of the one and

90 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

the sensuousness of the other. The twofold
elements in him were kindly mixed and blended
in a rare beauty and purity of manliness.
Writing to a friend about his Theocritean son-
nets, he says that he composed them in order to
relax his mind. " To a man occupied in sermon-
writing and parochial visitation it is intellectual
change of air to go back in thought to a pre-
Christian age : and I confess that I have never
been able to emancipate myself (as most clergy-
men do) from the classical bonds which school-
masters and college tutors for so many years
did their best to weave around me. And then I
have such an intense sympathy with the joys and
griefs, hopes and fears, passions and actions of
1 the young life' that I find myself in closer
affinity to Greek feeling than most people would.
At the same time, I should be sorry to help on
that Hellenic revival which some Oxford teachers
desire." At another time he writes : " I find the
school of Keats more congenial to my ' natural
man ' than the school of Keble. And in my
more truthful moments the temper of Sophocles
seems more akin to mine than the temper of
Thomas a Kempis, though the ' Imitatio ' is
seldom far from my hand. I mean to struggle
on to a less perishable standpoint, and hope
(D.V.) to diminish the frequency of my lapses
into Hellenism."

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 91

II

Indeed, Lefroy seems, through some special
privilege of temperament, to have hit by instinct
upon the right solution of difficult problems,
which many less well-balanced natures seek after
in vain, because they are too coarsely fibred, too
revolutionary, or peradventure too intemperate.
Thus he felt able to write candidly to a friend
upon a topic which is not often discussed among
men (1883): "I have an inborn admiration
for beauty of form and figure. It amounts
almost to a passion. And in most football teams
I can find one Antinous, sometimes two or
three. And surely it is very beautiful to see
the rapid movement of a perfect animal, &c.
Some folk would say it was a mark of sickly or
diseased sentimentalism to admire any but
feminine flesh. But that only proves how base
is the carnalit}', which is now reckoned the only
legitimate form. The other is far nobler, unless
it be vilely prostituted : and were I painter,
sculptor or poet, I would teach the world so.
Platonic passion in any relationship is better
than the animalism which will go to all ex-
tremes." This passage strikes the key-note to
a great deal of his best poetry, and shows in
how true a sense he possessed the Greek virtue
ol temperate self-control. Modern men refuse to

92 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

admit the possibility of purity in emotions which
are stimulated by the aspects of physical beauty
in the male and female sex. On the banks of
the Ilissus they felt and thought differently ;
and Lefroy existed to prove that the Lysis and
Charmides of Plato are not masterpieces of
artistic hypocrisy, concealing foulness.

His opinions regarding the right way of
remaining faithful to the Greek ideal of life,
without sacrificing cleanliness of conduct, obe-
dience to the law, or holiness of spirit, are
fully set forth in an address on " Muscular
Christianity." This was printed at Oxford in
1877 (Slatter & Rose), when the Chair of Poetry,
vacated by Sir Francis Doyle, was being some-
what warmly disputed. A Rev. St. John
Tyrwhitt upon that occasion wrote against what
Lefroy himself called the " Hellenic revival which
some Oxford teachers desire ; " and I can dis-
cern an echo of the controversy in the Address,
from which I mean to quote some passages. It
is mainly directed against Mr. Pater and myself,
to some extent also against Matthew Arnold.
But " Pater-paganism and Symonds-sophistry "
— that is to say, the views expressed by Pater
in the last essay of his " Studies in the History
of the Renaissance," and by Symonds in the
last chapter of his " Studies of Greek Poets :
Second Series " — -are the principal objects of his

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 93

attack. " What Mr. Symonds and Mr. Pater,
and their followers, advise us to do," he says,
" may be summed up in a single sentence : ' Act
according to the promptings of nature, and you
cannot go wrong.1 .... In the present case,
what is meant by the term ' nature ' ? Is it
Anglo-Byzantine (as Mr. Tyrwhitt would say)
for the worst passions and most carnal inclina-
tion of humanity ? I fear that there is too
much reason to dread an affirmative answer.
.... I have called the new religion a pseudo-
Hellenism, and for this reason : it sesms to
differ in a very important respect from Hellenism
properly so-called. The Greeks had at least
an ideal standard, that which they indicated by
the term TO KaXov. Unquestionably they often
fell short of it, not only in their practice, but in
their doctrine on particular points ; but there is
no inconsistency in the general teaching of
their greatest philosophers, or in the avowed
aim of their statesmen and legislators. They
all pointed to the honourable, the comely, the
beautiful, in every department of thought and
action. They would not have tolerated for a
moment a philosophy which bade each man
follow freely the bent of his own unchastened
disposition, or encouraged the cultivation of
merely sensual faculties, without an equal train-
ing of man's diviner instincts."

94 EDWARD CR A CROFT LEFROY

I need not discuss the question how far
Lefroy was just to either Mr. Pater or myself, as
regards our doctrine and our practice ; because
I have not introduced this passage with any
polemical object, but only with the view of making
his position clear, and of showing how decidedly
he disagreed with the prominent " Hellenisers "
of his period. It was both the strength and the
weakness of Lefroy's philosophy that he began
by postulating the Christian faith as a divinely
appointed way of surmounting the corruption and
imperfection of nature. His strength ; because
he undoubtedly lived by this faith. His weak-
ness ; because it is impossible to demonstrate or
to maintain that Christianity has this efficacy.
" Muscular Christianity," to use his own phrase,
" includes all that is brightest in Hellenism, and
all that is purest in Hebraism." Alas ! It was
not Muscular Christianity, but one Muscular
Christian, Lefroy himself, who included these two
excellences.

Ill

There is a strong personal accent in all Lefroy's
writing ; the " breezy healthfulness of thought
and feeling " which his reviewer noted ; the un-
tainted Hellenism broadening and clarifying

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 95

Christian virtues, which I have attempted to
describe.

This attitude of mind is sufficiently well set
forth in the last sonnet of the series. It is en-
titled " An Apology," and may here be cited,
although in form and language it falls below the
level of Lefroy's best writing :

"/ hold not lightly by this world of sense,
So full it is of things that make me cheer.
I deem that mortal blind of soul and dense,
To whom created joys are less than dear.
The heaven we hope for is not brought more near
By spurning drops of love that filter thence :
In Nature's prism some purple beams appear,
Of unreveattd light the effluence.
Then count me not, O yearning hearts, to blame
Because at Beauty's call mine eyes respond,
Nor soon convict me of ignoble aim,
Who in the schools of life .am frankly fond;
For out of earth's delightful things we frame
Our only visions of the world beyond."

Some of Lefroy's finest work is done in the
key suggested by this sonnet. He felt that life
itself is more than literature : the real poems are
not what we sing, but what we feel and see.
This thought, which is indeed the base-note of
all Walt Whitman's theories upon art, is ad-
mirably rendered in "From Any Poet" (No.
xxxvii.) :

96 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

" Oh, Fair and Young, we singers only lift
A mirror to your beauty dimly true,
And what you gave us, that we give to you,
And in returning minimise the gift.
We trifle like an artist brought to view
The nuggets gleaming in a golden drift,
Who, while the busy miners sift and sift,
Will take his idle brush and paint a few.
O Young and Glad, O Shapely, Fair, and Strong^
Yours is the soul of verse to make, not mar !
In you is loveliness : to you belong
Glory and grace : we sing but what you are.
Pleasant the song perchance ; but oh, how far
The beauty sung of doth excel the song."

Feeling this, Lefroy felt, like Alfred de Musset,
that the poet's true applause is praise bestowed
upon him by the young :

" O hearts of youth, so brightly, frankly true,
To gods and bards alike your praise is dear ;
Though wreaths from adult hands be all unseized,
Our crowns are crowns indeed if thrown by you"

These lines, from a sonnet entitled " A Story
of Aurelius " (No. xxxviii.), suffer by their sever-
ance from the rest of the poem. It may be said,
indeed, in passing, that, spontaneous and un-
studied as his work appears, Lefroy had a fine
sense of unity. None of his pieces, to my mind,
can be rightly estimated, except in their total
effect. I will illustrate this by quoting at full
" Bill : A Portrait " (No. xxxvi.) :

EDWARD CR A CROFT LEFROY 9?

" I know a lad with sun-illumined eyes,
Whose constant heaven is fleckless of a cloud ;
He treads the earth with heavy steps and proud,
As if the gods had given him for a prize
Its beauty and its strength. What money buys
Is his ; and his the reverence unavowed
Of toiling men for men who never bowed
Their backs to any burden anywise.
And if you talk of pain, of doubt, of ill,
He smiles and shakes his head, as who should say,
' The thing is black, or white, or what you will :
Let Folly rule, or Wisdom : any way
I am the dog for whom this merry day
Was made, and I enjoy it.' That is Bill."

The grace of this composition is almost rustic,
the music like to that of some old ditty piped by
shepherds in the shade. The subrisive irony,
the touch of humour, the quiet sympathy with
Nature's and Fortune's gilded darling, give it a
peculiar raciness. But after all is said, it leaves
a melody afloat upon the brain, a savour on the
mental palate. Only lines four and five seem to
interrupt the rhythm by sibilants and a certain
poverty of phrase — as though (which was perhaps
the case) two separate compositions had been
patched together.

A companion portrait, this time of a maiden,
may be placed beside it — " Flora " (No. xxxv.):

" Some faces scarce are born of earth, they say ;
Thine is not one of them, and yet 'tis fair ;

G

98 EDWARD CR A CROFT LEFROY

Showing the buds of hope in soft array,
Which presently will burst and blossom there ;
Now small as bells that Alpine meadows bear, —
Too low for any boisterous wind to sway.
Why should we think it shame for youth to wear
A beauty portioned from the natural day ?
'Tis thine to teach us what dull hearts forget,
How near of kin we are to springing flowers.
The sap from Nature's stem is in us yet ;
Young life is conscious of uncancelled powers.
And happy they who, ere youth's sun has set,
Enjoy the golden unreturning hours."

In all these sonnets there are charming single
lines :

" How near of kin we are to springing flowers. "
Of children, in another place, he says :

" To you the glory and to us the debt."
And again, in yet another sonnet :

" We press and strive and toil from morn till eve ;
From eve to morn our waking thoughts are grim.
Were children silent, we should half believe
That joy were dead — its lamp would burn so dim."

This special sympathy with what he called
" the young life " finds noble expression in four
sonnets dedicated to the sports of boyhood.
Here is " A Football Player " (No. xxvii.) :

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 99

" If I could paint you, friend, as you stand there,
Guard of the goal, defensive, open-eyed,
Watching the tortured bladder slide and glide
Under the twinkling feet ; arms bare, head bare,
The breeze a-tremble through crow-tufts of hair ;
Red-brown in face, and ruddier having spied
A wily foeman breaking from the side ;
A ware of him — of all else unaware :
If I could limn you as you leap and fling
Your weight against his passage, like a wall;
Clutch him, and collar him, and rudely cling
For one brief moment till he falls— you fall :
My sketch would have what Art can never give —
Sinew and breath and body ; it would live."

The " Cricket-Bowler" follows (No. xxviii.):

" Two minutes'1 rest till the next man goes in !
The tired arms lie with every sinew slack
On the mown grass. Unbent the supple back,
And elbows apt to make the leather spin
Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin —
In knavish hands a most unkindly knack;
But no guile shelters under this boy's black
Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin.
Two minutes only. Conscious of a. name,
The new man plants his weapon with profound
Long-practised skill that no mere trick may scare.
Not loth, the rested lad resumes the game :
The flung ball takes one madding tortuous bound,
And the mid-stump three somersaults in air"

The third, not so perfect in execution, cele-
brates the runner's noble strife. It is called
" Before the Race " (No. xxix.) :

ioo EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

" The impatient starter waxeth saturnine.
' 7s the bell cracked ? ' he cries. They make it sound :
And six tall lads break through the standers round.
I watch with Mary while they form in line ;
White jerseyed all, but each with some small sign,
A broidered badge or shield with painted ground,
And one with crimson kerchief sash-wise bound;
I think we know that token, neighbour mine.
Willie, they call you best of nimble wights;
Yet brutal Fate shall whelm in slippery ways
Two soles at least. Will it be you she spites ?
Ah well! 'Tis not so much to win the bays.
Uncrowned or crowned, the struggle still delights;
It is the effort, not the palm we praise."

Very finely conceived and splendidly expressed
is the fourth of these athletic sonnets, which
connects aesthetic impressions with underlying
moral ideas. " A Palaestral Study " (No. xxxi.) :

" The curves of beauty are not softly wrought :
These quivering limbs by strong hid muscles held
In attitudes of wonder, and compelled
Through shapes more sinuous than a sculptor's thought,
Tell of dull matter splendidly distraught,
Whisper of mutinies divinely quelled, —
Weak indolence of flesh, that long rebelled,
The spirit's domination bravely taught.
And all man's loveliest works are cut with pain.
Beneath the perfect art we know the strain,
Intense, defined, how deep soe'er it lies.
From each high masterpiece our souls refraint

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 101

Not tired of gazing, but with stretched eyes
Made hot by radiant flames of sacrifice."

I think it will be felt, from these examples,
that in Lefroy's now almost forgotten work a true
poet drew authentic inspiration from the beautiful
things which lie nearest to the artist's vision in
the life of frank and simple human beings. His
sonnets rank high in that region of Art which I
have elsewhere called " democratic." The sensi-
bility to subjects of this sort may be frequent
among us ; but the power of seizing on their
essence, the faculty for lifting them into the
aesthetic region without marring their wilding
charm, are not common. For this reason, be-
cause just here seems to lie his originality, I
have dwelt upon this group of poems. Their
Neo-Hellenism is so pure and modern, their
feeling for physical beauty and strength is so
devoid of sensuality, their tone is so right and
yet so warmly sympathetic, that many readers
will be grateful to a singer, distinguished by rare
personal originality, who touched common and
even carnal things with such distinction. I
might enforce this argument by quoting "The
New Cricket Ground," " Childhood and Youth,"
" In the Cloisters : Winchester College." But,
as the Greeks said, the half is more than the
whole.

102 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

IV

The thirty " Echoes from Theocritus " are all
penetrated with that purged Hellenic sentiment
which was the note of Lefroy's genius. They
are exquisite cameos in miniature carved upon
fragments broken from the idylls ; nor do I dis-
agree with a critic who said, when they first
appeared, that " rarely has the great pastoral
poet been so freely transmuted without loss of
his spell." Nevertheless, these sonnets have not
the same personal interest, nor, in my opinion,
the same artistic importance, as others in which
the poet's fancy dealt more at large with themes
suggested to him by his study of the Greek
past. Take this, for instance : " Something
Lost " (No. xviii.) :

" How changed is Nature from the Time antique !
The world we see to-day is dumb and cold;
Jt has no word for us. Not thus of old
It won heart-worship from the enamoured Greek.
Through all fair forms he heard the Beauty speak ;
To him glad tidings of the Unknown were told
By babbling runlets, or sublimely rolled
In thunder from the cloud- enveloped peak.
He caught a message at the oak's great girth,
While prisoned Hamadryads weirdly sang :
He stood where Delphi's Voice had chasm-birth,

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 103

And o'er strange vapour watched the Sibyl hang;
Or where, 'mid throbbing of the tremulous earth,
The caldrons of Dodona pulsed and rang."

Here we feel that Lefroy (like Wordsworth
when he yearned for Triton rising in authentic
vision from the sea) had his soul lodged in
Hellas. Of how many English poets may not
this be said ? " Come back, ye wandering Muses,
come back home ! " Landor was right. The
home of the imagination of the artist is in Greece.
Gray, Keats, Shelley, even Byron, Landor,
Wordsworth, even Matthew Arnold, all the great
and good poets who have passed away from us,
signified this truth in one way or in another,
each according to his quality. It was the dis-
tinction of Lefroy that he " came back home "
with a peculiarly fresh and child-like perception
of its charm. Seeking to define his touch upon
Hellenic things, I light upon this barren and
scholastic formula : he had a spiritual apperception
of sensuous beauty. The strong, clear music
which throbbed so piercingly, so passionately,
round the Isles of Greece, reached his sense
attenuated and refined — like the notes of the
Alpine horn, after ascending and tingling through
a thousand feet of woods and waterfalls and
precipices. Here is the echo of it in his sonnet,
" On the Beach in November " (No. xvii.) :

104

" My heart's Ideal, that somewhere out of sight
Art beautiful and gracious and alone, —
Haply where blue Saronic waves are blown
On shores that keep some touch of old delight,-—
How welcome is thy memory, and how bright,
To one who watches over leagues of stone
These chilly northern waters creep and moan
From weary morning unto weary night.

0 Shade-form, lovelier than the living crowd,
So kind to votaries, yet thyself unvowed,

So free to human fancies, fancy-free,

My vagrant thought goes out to thee, to thce,

As, wandering lonelier than the Poet's cloud,

1 listen to the wash of this dull sea."

How he could convey a single Greek sugges-
tion into the body of an English poem may be
exemplified by " A Thought from Pindar " (No.
xxxix.) :

" Twin immortalities man's art doth give
To man; both fair; both noble; one supreme.
The sculptor beating out his portrait scheme
Can make the marble statue breathe and live;
Yet with a life cold, silent, locative;
It cannot break its stone-eternal dream,
Or step to join the busy human stream,
But dwells in some high fane a hieroglyph.
Not so the poet. Hero, if thy name
Lives in his verse, it lives indeed. For then
In every ship thou sailest passenger
To every town where aught of soul doth stir,
Through street and market borne, at camp and
And. on the lipi, and in the hearts of men I"

EDWARD CR A CROFT LEFROY

105

The contrast between the powers of two rival
arts, sculpture and poetry, to confer immortal
fame upon some noble agent in the world's
drama, has been well conceived and forcibly
presented.

Like all poets who have confined their prac-
tice mainly to contemplative and meditative forms
of verse, Lefroy reflected on the nature of art.
That he was not in theory " the idle singer of
an idle day " may be gathered from a sonnet
entitled " Art that Endures " (No. Ixviii.) :

" Marble of Paros, bronze that will not rust,
Onyx or agate, — sculptor, choose thy block I
Not clay nor wax nor perishable stock
Of earthy stones can yield a virile bust
Keen-edged against the centuries. Strive thou itt'.tst
In molten brass or adamantine rock
To carve the strenuous shape which shall not mock
Thy faith by crumbling dust upon thy dust.
Poet, the warning comes not less to thee !
Match well thy metres with a strong design.
Let noble themes find nervous utterance. Flee
The frail conceit, the weak mellifluous line.
High thoughts, hard forms, toil, rigour, — these be thine
And steadfast hopes of immortality."

With this lofty conception of the spirit in
which the artist should approach his task, Lefroy
did not exaggerate his own capacity as poet or
seek to exalt his function, A sonnet called

io6 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

"The Torch-Bearer" (No. Ixvi.) expresses, in a
charming metaphor, the thought that poetry is
but the soul's light cast upon the world for other
souls to see by :

" In splendour robed for some court-revelry
A monarch moves when eve is on the wane.
His faithful lieges flock their prince to see,
And strive to pierce the gathering shade — in vain.
But lo, a torch! And now the brilliant train
Is manifest. Who may the bearer be?
Not great himself, he maketh greatness plain.
To him this praise at least. What more to me?
Mine is a lowly Muse. She cannot sing
A pageant or a passion; cannot cry
With clamorous voice against an evil thing,
And break its power; but seeks with single eye
To follow in the steps of Love, her King,
And hold a light for men to see Him by."

In another place (No. i.) he disclaims his
right or duty to attack the higher paths of poesy,
saying of his Muse :

" She hath no mind for 'freaks upon the fells,'
No wish to hear the storm-wind rattling by :
She loves her cowslips more than immortelles,
Her garden-clover than the abysmal sky :
In a green dell her chosen sweetheart dwells :
The mountain-height she must not, does not, try."

That sense of inadequacy which every modest
worker feels from time to time, when lie com-

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 107

pares "this man's art or that man's scope" with
his own performance, and the reaction from its
benumbing oppression under the influence of
healthier reflection, are expressed with delightful
spontaneity in " Two Thoughts " (No. xliii.) :

" When I reflect how small a space I fill
In this great teeming world of labourers,
How little I can do with strongest will,
How marred that little by most hateful blurs, —
The fancy overwhelms me, and deters
My soul from putting forth so poor a skill :
Let me be counted with those worshippers
Who lie before God's altar and are still.
But then I think (for healthier moments come)
This power of will, this natural force of hand, —
What do they mean, if working be not wise ?
Forbear to weigh thy work, O Soul! Arise,
And join thee to that nobler, sturdier band
Whose worship is not idle, fruitless, dumb."

It was not to be expected that a man who
vibrated so deeply and truly to the beauty of
the world and to the loveliness of " the young
life," and who was himself condemned to life-
long sickness with no prospect but the grave
upon this planet, should not have left some
utterances upon the problems of death and

io8 EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

thwarted vitality. It must be remembered, how-
ever, that Lefroy was a believing Christian, and
for him the tomb was, therefore, but a doorway
opened into regions of eternal life. It is highly
characteristic of the man that, in his poetry, he
made no vulgar appeal to the principles of his
religious creed, but remained within the region
of that Christianised Stoicism I have attempted
to define. We feel this strongly in the sonnets
" To An Invalid " (No. liv.), " On Reading a
Poet's Life" (No. lix.), and "The Dying
Prince" (No. xlvii.). All of these, for their
intrinsic merits, are worthy of citation. But
space fails ; and I would fain excite some
curiosity for lovely things to be discovered by the
reader when a full edition of Lefroy 's " Remains "
appears. I shall, therefore, content myself with
the transcription of the following most original
poem upon the old theme of " Quern Di Dili-
gunt " (No. Ivii.) :

" O kiss the almond-blossom on the rod !
A thing has gone from us that could not stay.
At least our sad eyes shall not see one day
All baseness treading where all beauty trod.
O kiss the almond-blossom on the rod !
For this our budding Hope is caught away
From growth that is not other than decay,
To bloom eternal in the halls of God.
And though of subtler grace we saw no sign^

EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY 109

No glimmer from the yet unrisen star, —
Full-orbed he broke upon the choir divine,
Saints among saints beyond the golden bar,
Round whose pale brows new lights of glory shine —
The aureoles that were not and that are."

The artistic value of Lefroy's work is great.
That first attracted me to him, before I knew
what kind of man 1 was to meet with in the
poet. Now that I have learned to appreciate
his life-philosophy, it seems to me that this is
even more noteworthy than his verse. We are
all of us engaged, in some way or another, with
the problem of co-ordinating the Hellenic and
Christian ideals, or, what is much the same
thing, of adapting Christian traditions to the
governing conceptions of a scientific age. Lefroy
proved that it is possible to combine reli-
gious faith with frank delight in natural love-
liness, to be a Christian without asceticism, and
a Greek without sensuality. I can imagine that
this will appear simple to many of my readers.
They will exclaim : " We do not need a minor
poet like Lefroy to teach that lesson. Has not
the problem been solved by thousands ? " Per-
haps it has. But there is a specific note, a
particular purity, a clarified distinction, in the
amalgam offered by Lefroy. What I have called
his spiritual apperception of sensuous beauty
was the outcome of a rare and exquisite per-

no EDWARD CRACROFT LEFROY

sonality. It has the translucent quality of a
gem, beryl or jacinth, which, turn it to the light
and view it from all sides, retains one flawless
colour. This simplicity and absolute sincerity
of instinct is surely uncommon in our perplexed
epoch. To rest for a moment upon the spon-
taneous and unambitious poetry which flowed
from such a nature cannot fail to refresh minds
wearied with the storm and stress of modern
thought. To abide in communion with an
individuality so finely and felicitously moulded
must be a source of strength and soothing to
those even who find themselves incapable of
taking up exactly the same fundamental prin-
ciples.

LA BETE HUMAINE

A STUDY IN ZOLA'S IDEALISM

IT is one of the mauvaises plaisanteries of the
epoch to call M. Zola a realist. Actually, he is
an idealist of the purest water ; and if idealists
are Philistines, then Gath can claim him for her
own. The ponderousness of his method, the
tedium of his descriptions, and the indecencies in
which he revels, do not justify his claim to stand
outside the ranks of those who treat reality from
an ideal point of view. Walt Whitman, one of
the staunchest idealists who ever uttered prophecy,
might be made to pass for a realist on the same
grounds of heaviness, minuteness, and indecency.
The fact is that Zola, like Whitman, approaches
his art-work in the spirit of a poet.

These assertions have an odour of paradox,
and require demonstration. That may be supplied
by an analysis of " La Bete Humaine." I will call
this book the poem of the railway. It is, indeed,

112 LA B$TE HU MAINE

a great deal more than that. But the unity of
subject, movement, composition, interest, which
constitutes a creation of idealising art, and
distinguishes that from the haphazard incom-
pleteness of reality, is found by Zola in the
biography of an engine on the line between
Paris and Havre. " La Lison," as the locomotive
is named, might be termed the heroine of the
romance.

This unity, which constitutes an ideal creation
of the brain, separating that from fact or from any
literal transcripts of reality, is sustained with extra-
ordinary ability and constructive genius through-
out "La Bete Humaine." All the personages of
the drama are in one way or another connected
with the company of the Quest line : as directors,
station-masters, guards, engine-drivers, stokers,
pointsmen, with their wives and mistresses.
The unity of place is equally preserved. Of the
many tragic episodes to which the action gives
rise, all are prepared at Paris or Havre in
buildings attached to the railway stations, and
all are consummated at a certain fatal point
between the stopping-places of Malaunay and
Barentin. There is a tunnel which plays an
important part in each catastrophe, and a way-
side house of doom at Croix-de-Maufras. This
house, in truth, has a right to claim equality
with the palace of Atreus at Mycenae. It is just

LA BETE HU MAINE 113

as mysterious, and no less haunted by the Furies
of an ancient crime. Guilty and innocent alike
are drawn within its neighbourhood, to be in-
volved in the mesh of destiny, which eventually
entangles all the dramatis personce. The scheme
by which Zola has worked out this unity of
subject, place and retribution is so mathematically
perfect, so mechanically exact, as to set all the
probabilities of actual events at defiance. Only
the extreme vivacity and photographic accuracy
of each incident in detail blind us to the immense
demand continually made upon our credulity by
the poet's ideality.

What is the meaning of the title. We find it
in this sentence : " Possdder, tuer, cela s'dqui-
valait-il, dans le fond sombre de la bete humaine ?"
(p. 196). Murder and sexual desire, co-existent,
confounding their qualities, emergent one out of
the other, in the nature of the irredeemable wild
beast, man : that is the double subject of the
book. These two brutal factors persist in
humanity. The machinery of modern life, the
train which goes hurling and howling down the
grooves of progress, remains an idle instrument
beside the passions of the human beast. " Ah !
c'est une belle invention, il n'y a pas a dire,"
says one of the persons in the story : " on va

vite, on est plus savant Mais les betes

sauvages restent des betes sauvages, et on aura

H

114 LA B&TE HUMAINE

beau inventer des mecaniques meilleures encore,
il y aura quand meme des betes sauvages
dessous " (p. 45). That other great invention
of the civilised brain, legal justice, fails to solve
the problems of social life, cannot penetrate the
passions which impel the wild beast, man, to
improbable or inconceivable actions. The in-
eptitude of the judge, M. Denizet, acute and
industrious in the search after truth as he may
be, forms a moral pendant to the blind brute
force of the locomotive which whirls human
beings to destruction. Justice does not fathom
the profundities of the beast's heart any better
than the railway engine is capable of sympathising
with its emotions.

The poetic unity which marks La JBSfe Humaine
out as a masterpiece of the constructive imagina-
tion, cannot be fully appreciated without passing
the main actors of its drama in review. The
first to whom we are introduced is a man called
Roubaud, " sous-chef de gare," or second station-
master, at Havre. He had risen from the ranks,
passing through several grades in the company's
service, until his vigour and good conduct
prepared him for a higher post. That, however,
might have still been long in coming had he not
married a young woman called Severine, who was
the protegee of the President Grandmorin, one
of the acting directors in the company. Severine,

LA BETE HU MAINE 115

a daughter of Grandmorin's gardener, had been
taken into the great man's family upon the death
of her father, and grew up in humble companion-
ship with his only daughter Berthe. Roubaud,
now on the verge of forty, wooed and won this
girl, his junior by fifteen years. Grandmorin
gave her a marriage portion of £400, advanced
her husband to the post of station-master, and
promised to leave her by his will a house at
Croix-de-Maufras, on the line between Rouen
and Havre. The property was valued at about
£1600.

Seve"rine is described as one of those graceful
fascinating women who charm men without
possessing any peculiar beauty. Her great at-
traction for the rough railway servant was the
distinction she derived from her education in
Grandmorin's family. Rather tall and slender,
she had a wealth of undulating dark hair, fram-
ing her pale face, and eyes of clear grey
blue — " yeux de pervenche." Roubaud sus-
pected nothing wrong in the protection extended
to her by the president ; for though there were
disquieting rumours afloat about his conduct,
he had reached an advanced if vigorous old age,
stood well at the Imperial Court, and owned a
property of some three millions of francs.

During _the opening scene between husband
and wife, which takes place in a little room over-

Ii6 LA BETE HU MAINE

looking the station of the Quest at Paris, an
accident leads Roubaud to the discovery that
M. Grandmorin had foully abused his quasi-
guardianship of the young woman when she was
a girl of sixteen. The wild beast in the man
awakes. His first impulse is to murder his wife,
and he very nearly does so with fists and feet.
On second thoughts, he determines to murder
Grandmorin. Opportunity enables him to do so
that very evening in a railway carriage between
Malaunay and Barentin. The weapon used is a
knife which Sdverine had just given him. The
place selected is the tunnel which has been
already mentioned. But the deed had not been
completed before the train emerged from the
tunnel, and swept on along a hedgerow. At that
point lay a young man, who had just time to catch
the vision of Roubaud stabbing his victim in the
throat, while a mass of something black weighed
on the murdered person's legs. He could not,
however, remember with any distinctness the
features of the two men, and was not certain
whether the black mass was a woman or a
railway-rug.

It is not necessary to describe how Roubaud's
professional familiarity with railway trains en-
abled him and Severine to escape detection by
shifting from one carriage to another, and back
again, at well-chosen moments. Enough that

LA BETE HU MAINE 117

they reached Havre apparently as usual, and
though suspected of the crime (their alleged
motive being a wish to anticipate Grandmorin's
bequest of the house at Croix-de-Maufras), they
were finally dismissed without a stain upon their
reputations.

The young man who obtained that fleeting
vision of the murder is Jacques Lantier, a son of
Gervaise (the heroine of Zola's L'Assomuioir),
and brother of a suicidal painter (the hero of
Zola's L'CEuvre). There is also one of the
Landers in Zola's Germinal. His peculiarity of
temperament has to be noticed. Coming of what
would now be called a neuropathical stock, he
was the victim of an inborn homicidal instinct.
It took the special form, that, from the age of
dawning manhood, he never desired a woman
without at the same time being irresistibly im-
pelled to kill her. " Tuer une femme, tuer une
femme ! cela sonnait a ses oreilles, du fond de sa
jeunesse, avec la fiSvre grandissante, affolante du
de"sir. Comme les autres, sous I'd veil de la
puberte", re~vent d'en posse"der une, lui s'etait
enrage" a 1'idee d'en tuer une " (p. 57). A vague
impression haunts his brain that this terrible
perversion of the sexual instinct derives from
a remote ancestry. Sitting by women in the
theatre, passing them in the streets, suddenly the
insane abominable impulse comes upon him, like

US LA BETE HUMAINE

a force superior to his will and reason. " Puis-
qu'il ne les connaissait pas, quelle fureur pouvait-
il avoir contre elles ? car, chaque fois, c'etait
comme une soudaine crise de rage aveugle, une
soif toujours renaissante de venger des offenses
tres anciennes, dont il aurait perdu 1'exacte
me~moire. Cela venait-il done de si loin, du mal
que les femmes avaient fait a sa race, de la
rancune amassde de male en male, depuis la
premiere tromperie au fond des cavernes ? " For
the rest, Jacques Lantier is a young man of
more than ordinary refinement ; physically attrac-
tive, with well-formed hands and a face that
would have been eminently sympathetic but for
the restlessness of the brown eyes, shot at times
with flakes of red. His position in the railway
company, which connects all these people in one
sphere of work, is that of engine-driver. De-
barred from the society of women by the fearful
malady which preys upon his brain, Lantier has
made a mistress of his engine, the strong, beauti-
ful, responsive creature, Lison, who twice daily
performs the journey between Havre and Paris
with express trains.

Lantier found himself in the evening of Grand-
morin's murder on the bank above the tunnel's
mouth, owing to a series of incidents which must
be related. A group of persons highly important
to the plot of La Bete Humaine appear now upon

LA BETE HU MAINE 119

the stage. Jacques had gone to visit a female
cousin of his father, who brought him up at
Plassans when his mother Gervaise deserted him
at the age of six. This woman, "tante Phasic,"
as she is called, was left a widow with two
daughters, Flore and Louisette. For her second
husband she married a miserable, lifeless crea-
ture named Misard, who is employed upon the
line of the Quest as signalman, at Croix-de-
Maufras. The house inhabited by the Misards
stands close to the railway, so that it is shaken
by the thunder of all the trains that pass ; and
at night the glare of their illuminated carriages
startles the sleepers in the bedrooms, and leaves
upon wakeful brains the silhouettes of countless
travellers going and coming upon the iron high-
way of the world. Close by lies the deserted
garden and the empty house which Se'verine is
destined to inherit from the President Grand-
morin. We are, therefore, at the local centre of
the tragedy. Misard, the signalman, is actuated
by only one motive in life, a slow, persistent
avarice. It works in his dull brain like a
spreading disease ; and just at this moment it
has brought him to the commission of a crime.
He is poisoning Phasic by little doses introduced
into her food, in order to gain possession of
some thousand francs which she has recently in-
herited. The woman knows what her husband

120 LA BETE HUMAINE

has in view. But she fancies herself strong and
keen-witted enough to defeat him, and persists
in this illusion till she dies of poison on the
night which determines one of the great crises of
the tragedy.

The two girls, Flore and Louisette, both of
them play parts in this closely woven drama.
Louisette went out to service in the country
house of Grandmorin. One day she left her
situation in a miserable plight, telling a dark
story of her master's violence, signs of which
were only too visible upon her body. Instead of
going home to Phasie, she took refuge in the
woods with a sort of gentle savage, a veritable
Orson, whom she called her " bon ami," and
whom in the natural course of events she would
probably have married. The name of this man
is Cabuche. Endowed with herculean strength,
he had killed a man by accident in a tavern
brawl, and had been sentenced to five years'
penal servitude. Leaving the prison at the end
of four years with a good character for discipline
and industry, Cabuche found himself avoided by
his neighbours, and went off to live in a hut
close to some deserted quarries. Here he em-
ployed himself in excavating huge blocks of
stone and carting them down to the nearest rail-
way station. The pure and intimate relation
which sprang up between him and the innocent

121

child Louisette, forms one of those romantic
episodes that bloom like flowers upon the arid
rock of Zola's human wilderness. Louisette
died of fever in the forest hut ; and Cabuche,
knowing well the real cause of her death, vowed
to take the life of Grandmorin. Suspicion
naturally fell on him when the president was
murdered ; and it was only due to political
reasons for quashing the whole investigation
that the good-hearted giant did not fall a victim
to M. Denizet's (the magistrate's) well-reasoned
system of analysis. Eventually, by another
train of circumstances which illustrates Zola's
plot-weaving and dexterous manipulation of his
characters, Cabuche is condemned for a murder
of which he is equally guiltless. He and
Louisette are the victims of fatality, crime in
others, the mistakes of justice.

Flore has her own place on the railway. At
Croix-de-Maufras, close by Misard's signal-box,
there is a level crossing. It is her duty to
attend to the opening and shutting of the barriers
at this point. Zola has drawn in Flore the
portrait of an Amazon, a primeval virgin, a
nymph of Dian's train. " Une grande fille de
dix-huit ans, blonde, forte, a la bouche e"paisse,
aux grands yeux verdatres, au front bas sous de
lourds cheveux. Elle n'e"tait point jolie, elle
avait les hanches solides et les bras durs d'un

122 LA BETE HU MAINE

(p. 37). Possessed of enormous
physical force, she kept importunate suitors at a
distance by the weight of her arms and fists.
" Elle e"tait vierge et guerriere, dedaigneuse du
male, ce qui finissait par convaincre les gens
qu'elle avait pour sur la tete derangde" (p. 53).
The fact is that she had early set her affections
upon Jacques Lantier, and was open to no other
influence of the passions. On the evening of
his visit to " la tante Phasic," chance brought
them alone together in the president's deserted
garden. The emotional trouble of the girl
roused Lander's latent malady. He was seized
with the irresistible impulse to kill instead of
possessing this woman on the point of yielding.
Rushing from her arms to avoid the horribje
suggestion, he roamed in the dark over field and
hedge until he sank exhausted at the spot where
the vision of Grandmorin's murder flashed across
his eyes. The ending of Flore's history may here
be related. Seeing Jacques devote himself to
another woman, and growing in course of time
to hate them both, she determined to wreck an
express train which she knew would carry the
lovers to Paris on a certain day. Flore attained
her object by contriving to arrest Cabuche's
waggon with its load of blocks upon the level
crossing just before the train came by. The
smash, of course, was awful. But Flore had the

LA BETE HU MAINE 123

disappointment of finding that neither Jacques
nor his mistress had been killed. He was carried,
bruised and wounded, into Grandmorin's house
at Croix-de-Maufras. There Severine, for she
was the woman, nursed him, and there he
eventually murdered her with the same knife
Roubaud had used to stab the president. But
this is anticipating the order of events. When
Flore saw that she had failed in the main part
of her design, and reflected on the number of
human lives she had sacrificed — lives hitherto
unreckoned by her, since daily cargoes of passen-
gers, unknown, unheeded, had been always going
and coming on the wings of steam before her
eyes — &he walked straight into the tunnel, and
standing upright before an approaching train,
was shattered to bits by the iron cuirass of the
engine. They laid what was left of her mangled
form by the side of her mother Phasic, who was
lying dead of Misard's poison in the signalman's
house.

Up to the present point of the analysis we
have had several types of murderers presented
to us. There is Roubaud, who kills from
motives of revenge and retrospective jealousy ;
Misard, who poisons his wife to get her money ;
Cabuche, who commits an accidental homicide
through heat of blood and strength of muscle ;
Lantier, who is the subject of a perverted

124 LA BETE HU MAINE

instinct, changing the natural impulse of sex into
blood-lust ; Flore, whose jealousy prompts her
to sacrifice a hecatomb of human victims in the
hope of killing her lover and her rival ; Grand-
morin, whose abnormal vices in old age lead to
the death of innocent Louisette. There remains
one other personage necessary to the unity of
this remarkable plot. He is Lander's stoker, a
debauched drunkard, called Pecqueux, who
works in good relations with the engine-driver
on their common pet, la Lison. Poor Lison,
by the way, ends her own locomotive life in the
wreck of the train at Croix-de-Maufras. Lantier
and Pecqueux have to drive another, and do so
with their usual harmony until Pecqueux obtains
ocular evidence that Lantier has been tampering
with his mistress Philomene. Of Philomene,
one of Zola's disagreeable characters, it is only
necessary to say that she lives in the station at
Havre, keeping house for her brother, the "chef
de d£p6t," and pursuing a course of reckless
immorality. Lantier was never in any true
sense her lover. But the stoker's jealousy once
roused he determines to revenge himself. It
happens, accordingly, that being more drunk
than usual one day he refuses to obey the engine-
driver's orders and insults him. They are alone
together on their locomotive, carrying a train ful
of soldiers, packed in cattle-pens, to Paris ; for

LA BETE HU MAINE 125

the Franco-Prussian War has broken out, troops
are being concentrated, and these men will be
drafted from Paris to the frontier. The quarrel
begun by Pecqueux ends in a struggle for
supremacy between the two men, in the course
of which both fall from the engine and are killed
upon the spot. La Bete Humaine winds up with
a description of the train and its freight of
soldiers hurling along the rails, dashing through
stations, driverless, uncontrollable. In what I
have called the idealism of Zola, this termination
of the story with its prospect of carnage and the
vision of man's mechanical instrument let loose
upon the pathway of destruction is highly
dramatic. He closes Nana with the shouts of
the Parisians yelling, "A Berlin! " The whole
series of the Rougon-Macquart volumes lead up
to the fall of the Empire. Again, with special
reference to this particular romance, the crowd-
ing together of a mass of human animals,
soldiers, food for powder, who are launched into
eternity through the jealous fury of a drunken
homicide — nothing, I assert, could be better
arranged to sustain the central idea, or less
probable as a piece of fortuitous reality. It also
has to be remarked that Pecqueux's fatal quarrel
begins at Croix-de-Maufras, which I have called
the local centre of the tragic drama. Dante
himself could not have designed the machinery

126 LA BETE HUMAINE

of a poem with more mathematical precision than
Zola has displayed in the construction of this
plot. Nature and the course of events, it need
hardly be said, do not act in this way.

Before proceeding to draw final critical con-
clusions, I have to resume what, after all, is the
most interesting matter in the book — Lantier's
love-affair with Severine. We have seen how
the engine-driver had a vision of the murder of
Grandmorin in the railway-carriage. Called as
a witness, he made a clean breast of all he knew,
but positively declared his inability to identify
any of the accused persons. Still he became
naturally an object of great anxiety to the
Roubauds ; and their strange behaviour toward
him, displayed in petty acts of courtesy and
signs of curiosity, convinced him that Roubaud
was the murderer, and that the black mass he
had discerned so dimly was the body of Seve"rine.
The three persons came thus to be drawn to-
gether in a complicity of knowledge, though
they never discussed the details of the crime.
Roubaud almost pushed Lantier into his wife's
arms ; and Lantier found, to his great astonish-
ment, that he could love her without awakening
the homicidal demon in his breast. The very
fact that she was a murderess seemed to render
her inviolable. SeveYine, yielding by slow de-
grees to the young man's passion, discerned for

LA B&TE HUMAINE 127

the first time what it was to love with the heart.
Her previous relations with Grandmorin and
Roubaud had not aroused the woman in her.
Lander's delicate attentions, the difficulties of
the situation, and finally the rapture of possession,
made her his slave. She grew to hate her
husband, who, since the epoch of the murder,
abandoned himself wholly to the vice of gaming.
Then she prompted her lover to kill the man
who stood in the way of their union. But
Lantier, in spite of his peculiar homicidal in-
sanity, could not murder in cold blood. At last
they agreed to decoy Roubaud alone one evening
to the empty house at Croix-de-Maufras, and
there Lantier promised he would do the deed.
The knife which had stabbed Grandmorin was
ready on the table. However, just at the fatal
moment, certain imprudences of Sdverine brought
a paroxysm of his malady upon her lover.
Lantier thrust the knife of destiny into her
throat, at the very point on the railway where
Grandmorin received his death-blow, and in the
room where Grandmorin's crime with her had
been committed so many years ago. He escaped
unseen, leaving the house-door open ; and when
Roubaud arrived with Misard, they found the
unfortunate Cabuche there covered with Se'vdrine's
blood. The presence of Cabuche is well motivirt
(as Goethe would say) ; and accessory circum-

128 LA BETE HU MAINE

stances lead M. Denizet to the conclusion that
he was the murderer of both Grandmorin and
Severine, instigated in each case by Roubaud.
During the course of the judicial proceedings
Roubaud confesses the murder of the president,
and is condemned. Cabuche has to bear the
guilt of Severine's assassination.

This analysis of La Bete Humaine shows in
how true a sense it may be called a poem. It
has all those qualities of the constructive reason
by which an ideal is distinguished from the bare
reality. Not only does it violate our sense of
probability in life that ten persons should be
either murderers or murdered, or both together,
when all of them exist in close relations through
their common connection with one line of railway,
but the short space of time required for the
evolution of this intricate drama of blood and
appetite is also unnatural. Eighteen months
suffice for the unfolding and termination of the
whole series of homicidal tragedies. At the end,
the stage is swept literally bare by the violent
deaths of all the principal persons who played
their parts upon it, with the exception of Misard,
who marries a woman of bad character, Roubaud,
who goes to life-imprisonment, and the un-
fortunate Cabuche, who receives a similar doom.
Even la Lison is destroyed, and her successor is
consigned to probable perdition by the insane
fury of Pecqueux. Nor is this all. The con-

LA BETE HU MAINE 129

ditions of place are manipulated with equal
idealistic ingenuity. I have already pointed out
how all the threads of the drama are tied together
in one knot at Croix-de-Maufras, that place upon
the line between Malaunay and Barentin at the
entrance to the fatal tunnel. When Lander
comes to the president's deserted house, at the
commencement of the story, he regards it with a
superstitious dread. "Cette maison, il la con-
naissait bien, il la regardait a chacun de ses
voyages, dans le branle grondant de la machine.
Elle le hantait sans qu'il sut pourquoi, avec la
sensation confuse qu'elle importait a son exist-
ence " (p. 51). It was here that he fled from
Flore under one access of his homicidal mania,
and it was here that he murdered Se"ve"rine under
the pressure of another. Here Grandmorin had
previously corrupted the girlhood of Madame
Roubaud. In its close vicinity stood the house
where Madame Misard died of poison, hard by
the level crossing where Flore wrecked the
train, not far from the tunnel where Grandmorin
was stabbed, Flore committed suicide, and Pec-
queux made his slaughterous attack on Lantier.
Nor must we forget the fatal knife, that present
which Seve"rine gave her husband in the opening
scene, which he used to assassinate the president,
which Severine meant should be the instrument
of Roubaud's death, and which Lantier finally
plunged into her own throat. It is impossible

i

1 30 LA BETE HUMAINE

to contend that this interweaving of a numerous
dramatis personce in one mesh of homicidal crime,
this concentration of so many murderous in-
cidents upon one spot, this crowding of them
into less than two years, and this part played by
the fatal knife, are realistic — if realism means a
faithful correspondence to facts as we observe
them, and a reproduction of the events of life as
they are known to us.

It may be urged that not a single character,
or motive, or circumstance in the whole prose-
poem (a long poem of four hundred and fifteen
closely-printed pages) has been idealised. That
is quite true. The people are studied from life.
They act and talk naturally. They say and do a
large number of things which are usually con-
cealed in literature, but which are none the less
veracious. The mechanism and management of
a great main line in France have been reproduced
with carefully accumulated details which we may
assume to be exact. Few of M. Zola's critics
know as much about such things as he does.
Also, the conduct of a train, its composition, the
relations of guards, station-masters, engine-
drivers, stokers, pointsmen, to one another, to
the machine they set in motion and control, and
to the passengers they carry, are presented with
Zola's usual detail, and with more than his usual
feeling for the poetry inherent in this phase of
modern life. The only point for criticism is at

LA BETE HU MAINE 131

the end of the romance, when the train, with its
freight of military cattle, starts forth driverless
upon that terrific course. Here we might,
indeed, pause to wonder how long the engine
would speed on alone with no one to stoke up its
furnace. Here, and here perhaps for once, M.
Zola yields consciously to the incorrigible idealism
of an artist. The romance closes with the pros-
pect of a tragedy which fitly winds the poem up,
but which might very probably have failed for
want of coals.

Zola's realism consists, then, in his careful
attention to details, in the naturalness of his
connecting motives, and his frank acceptance of
all things human which present themselves to
his observing brain. The idealism which I have
been insisting on, which justifies us in calling
La Bete Humaine a poem, has to be sought in
the method whereby these separate parcels of
the plot are woven together, and also in the
dominating conception contained in the title
which gives unity to the whole work. We are
not in the real region of reality, but in the region
of the constructive imagination from the first to
the last line of the novel. If that be not the
essence of idealism — this working of the artist's
brain not in but on the subject-matter of the ex-
ternal world and human nature — I do not know
what meaning to give to the term.

MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

VAL DE VIRE was one of the richest and most
favoured regions of old Normandy. The country
has a look of Devonshire or Somerset. Grass-
land and orchards intersected by deep lanes,
feathery with ferns and fox-gloves. Sluggish
streams, bordered with yellow flags and flower-
ing rush ; banks blue with columbine. Spinneys
and copses, mossy homesteads, hedged grazing
meadows, humble churches, slouching stable-
men, and sturdy farmers. The names of towns
and villages remind one constantly of noble
English families, who came from them across the
channel, and of these one of the most picturesquely
situated is St. Lo. It stands on a hill of solid
grey rock overhanging the Vire — a stream not
unlike our Avon, which winds through wooded
slopes of dark red iron-stone and lime-stone,
curving a gentle course toward the open plain
and not far distant sea. The valley, the river,
the woods, the gardens on the hills, the broad

134 MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

meadow- land beyond, can all be surveyed from
the square of the Cathedral. This is an irregular
and decrepit old church, interesting by reason of
its imperfections. No one part of the building
corresponds to the rest ; the chapels sprawl at
oblique angles ; the towers are ingeniously con-
structed to combine similarity and difference.
The workmanship throughout is loose, dishevelled,
mongrel. Yet there are beautiful wide windows :
labyrinths of grey glass, like spiders' webs, en-
closing figures bright as gems with green and
blue and fiery crimson. Outside, there is a little
stone pulpit — like the one in the courtyard of
Magdalen College Oxford — open to the air, with
a Gothic canopy above it. Here one can fancy
monks preaching or pardoners displaying their
indulgences to country folk in Lent.

It was at St. Lo that I picked up a collection
of " Chansons Normandes du xvme Siecle," pub-
lished from manuscripts existing in private
libraries at Vire and Bayeux. They consist
for the most part of drinking-songs and love-
ditties ; but fragments of ballads and a few
patriotic songs, relating to the wars with Eng-
land, give variety to this material. Like all
literary efforts of a rustic population, the Vaux
de Vire, as they were called, are distinguished
by simplicity and spontaneity. Their frequent
repetition of the same ideas proves the intellectual

MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS 135

poverty of the source from which they were
derived. The want of art in their composition
guarantees the genuineness of the feelings which
produced them. We seem, while reading their
refrains and lays, to hear the voices of genera-
tions living tranquilly in the same round, revolving
in one routine of natural joys and sorrows :
rejoicing in the warmth of summer, and shrink-
ing from the winter's cold ; expanding in the
spring to love, and welcoming the autumn with
its gift of wine and fruit. There is a pathos in
this half-developed poetry, like that which thrills
us in the unfoldings of the first buds and leaves
of spring. It is so near to all things natural ;
like earth herself, so very old and yet so fresh
and new. Centuries and centuries of men and
women have felt and sung like this : used the
same images of joy adopted from the fields in
April or in May, crooned the same melodies
borrowed from streams and winds and waving
trees. The song of the thrush and the black-
bird, the note of the nightingale, the blossoms of
the apple-tree and thorn, the freshness of the
greenwood after winter snows have melted —
these are the ever recurring themes of pleasure,
hope, and love, on which the rustic singers dwell.
It is a poetry singularly sympathetic to the
pastoral country which developed it. The lyrics
of the Minnesingers and Provengal Troubadours

136 MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS

have something similar in monotone to this ; but
the clang of arms and the stirring of the great
world were never far distant from the ladies'
bowers in which they sounded : whereas these
Norman ditties breathe of nothing but the crofts
and cottages and pastures of a village. If the
noise of war is heard at all in Val de Vire,
it is but some marauding band of English
foragers, who come to lift the cattle and to make
great pillage of the Duchy. The peasants rise
and do their best to pay back force with force,
and deep and deadly is the hatred stored against
their foes. From the beginning to the end of
this scanty literature, we remain within the narrow
circle of local interests, and it is this which gives
it a peculiar charm. The Vaux de Vire should
be read in Normandy in May. Their flavour,
like that of the cider which gushes from the
presses of St. Lo or St. Sever, is native to the
fat fair orchard-land which gave them birth so
many years ago.

To translate popular songs is never very easy.
Yet these offer fewer difficulties than those, for
instance, of the Tuscan and the Umbrian high-
lands. The old French is clear and limpid ; the
metrical structure in most cases very simple. It
will be observed that, in the English versions I
am .about to offer, one peculiarity of the originals
— a curious monotony of recurring and repeated

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 137

rhymes — has been retained. The succession of
rhymes I have sometimes altered, where I thought
our language needed it.

The first group are the love-songs, by far the
most numerous and characteristic of the collection.
We may start with one in which a lover sings
the praises of his sweetheart :

Fair is her body, bright her eye,
With smiles her mouth is kind to me;
Then, think no evil, this is she
Whom God hath made my only joy.

Between the earth and heaven high
There is no maid so fair as she ;
The beauty of her sweet body
Doth ever fill my heart with joy.

He is a knave, nor do I lie,
Who loveth her not heartily;
The grace that shines from her body
Giveth to lovers all great joy.

Sometimes the accented passages remind us of
Elizabethan lyric, as in the repeated last line of
the following quatrain :

Sad, lost in thought, and mute I go :
The cause, ah me ! you know full well :
But see that nought thereof you tell,

For men will only laugh at woe —

For men will only laugh at woe.

138 MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

The same effect is gained by the echoed
questions in this catch :

Kiss me then, my merry May,
By the soul of love I pray !

Prithee, nay ! Tell, tell me why ?
If with you I sport and play,
My mother will be vexed to-day.

Tell me why, oh, tell me why?

I must confess to having slightly modernised
two pretty but imperfect pieces, which play upon
the different tribes of singing birds :

Before my lady's window gay,
The little birds they sing all day,

The lark, the mavis, and the dovej
But the sweet nightingale of May,
She whiles the silent hours away,

Chanting of sorrow, joy, and love.

The dove in the next song is clearly metaphor-
ical for some fair damsel, who has been tamed
to appreciate the caresses of a swain :

/ found at daybreak yester morn,
Close by the nest where she was bornt

A tender turtle dove :
Oha! oh/! ohesa, hesa, h/!

She fluttered, but she could not fly ;
I heard, but would not heed her cry:

She had not learned to love:
Oha! ohJ! ohesa, hesa, h/!

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 139

Now she is quiet on my breast,
And from her new and living nest

She doth not seek to rove :
Oha! ohJ! ohesa, hesa, he" I

Occasionally the lyric note closely resembles
that belonging to the love-songs of the Carmina
Burana. I have found, in translating both, that
the effect produced in English is almost exactly
the same, without any intention on my own part.
This is the case with the rather pretty but
insipid piece which follows :

This month of May, one pleasant eventide,
I heard a young girl singing on the green;

I came upon her where the ways divide,

And said, " God keep you, maiden, from all teen.

" Maiden, the God of love you keep and save,

And give you all your heart desires," I cried.
Then she: "Pray tell me, gentle sir and brave,
Whither you wend this pleasant eventide?"

" To you I come, a lover leal and true,

To tell you all my hope and all my care;
Your love alone is what I seek; than you
No woman ever seemed to me more fair."

The parting of two lovers, also in the leafy
forest- glades, has a throb of keener passion :

In this first merry morn of May,

When as the year grows young and green.

Into the wood I went my way,
To say farewell unto my queen.

140 MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS

And when we. could no longer stay.

Weeping upon my neck she fell,
Oh, send me news from far away !

Farewell, sweet heart of mine, farewell I

The ladies, in the absence of their lovers, are
anxious for news. Their longing thoughts do
not, however, borrow the wings of a bird, as in
the more imaginative poetry of central Italy.
The heart's unrest finds simpler expression.
Take for instance the following song, the close of
which strikes me as charmingly fanciful in its
disconnection from the main theme :

O Love, my love and perfect bliss !
God in His goodness grant me this —

/ see thee soon again.
Nought else I need to take away
The grief that for thy sake alway

Doth keep me in great pain.

A las ! I know not what to do,
Nor how to get good news and true :

Dear God, I pray to Thee;
If else Thou canst not comfort me,
Of Thy great mercy make that he

Send speedy news to me.

Within my father's garden walls
There is a tree — when April falls

It blossometh alway.
There wend I oft in winter drear,
Yea, and in spring, the winds to hear,

The sweet winds at their play.

MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS 141

The motif of a bird as messenger occurs in
the next ditty ; but a nightingale, and not the
swallow, has been chosen :

Alas! poor heart, I pity thee

For all the grief thou hast and care!
My love I see not anywhere;

He is so far away from me.

Until once more his face I see
I shall be sad by night and day;

A nd if his face I may not see

Then I shall die most certainly :

For other pleasures have I none,

And all my hope is this alone.
No ease I take by night and day :
O Love, my love, to thee I pray
Have pity upon me!

Dear nightingale of woodland gay,

Who singest on the -leafy tree,
Go, take a message I thee pray,

A message to my love from me ;
Tell, tell him that I waste away
And weaker grow from day to day.

Ah, God! what pain and grief have we
Who are poor lovers, leal and true :
For every week that we pass through,

Five hundred thousand griefs have we :
One cannot think, or count, or tell
The griefs and pains that we know well/

142 MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

A forlorn swain echoes the same lament in
stanzas which, though monotonous, have an
accent of poignant sincerity :

Now who is he on earth that lives,

Who knows or with his tongue can say

What grief to poor lovers it gives
To love with loyal heart alway ?

So bitter is their portion, yea,

So hard their part !

But this doth more confound my heart;
Unloved to love, and still to pray !
Thinking thereon I swoon away.

A man is trying to unlock the secret of a
maiden's bosom. It is a lover and his lass,
sauntering in twilight between hedgerows
heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and wild
roses. From the tenour of the swain's pleading,
we may feel assured that he does not suffer
under any great anxiety about her answer :

Siveet flower, that art so fair and gay,
Come tell me if thou lovest me !
Think well, and tell me presently :

For sore it irks me, by my fay,

For sore it irkcth me alway,

That I know not the mind of thee :

I pray thee, gentle lady gay,
If so thou wilt, tell truth to me.

MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS 143

For I do love thee so, sweet May,
That if my heart thou wert to see,
In sooth I know, of courtesy,

Thou wouldst have pity on me this day.

A girl has plighted her troth. She is sure of
the man's loyalty, tranquil in the sense of his
affection ; not to repay him with truth and kind-
ness in like measure, would be base :

My love for him shall be
Fair love and true :
For he loves me, I know,

And I love him, pardie !

And for I know that he,

Doth love me so,

I should be all untrue
To love but him, pardie!

The greenwood was the common trysting
place for sweethearts. Here is a song of
spring-time in which the contentment of secure
affection is very prettily expressed :

Beneath the branch of the tureen may
My merry heart sleeps happily,
Waiting for him who promised me

To meet me here again this day.

And what is that I would not do
To please my love so dear to me ?

He loves me with leal heart and true,
And I love him no less, pardie!

144 MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

Perchance I see him but a day ;

Yet maketh he my heart so fret—'

His beauty so rejoiceth me —
That months thereafter I am gay.

We hear a good deal about " faux jaloux '
and scandals, calumnious reports, and malignant
gossip. A damsel is indignant because her
sweetheart's personal appearance has been de-
preciated by persons who might have been better
occupied in minding their own business :

They have said evil of my dear;
Therefore my heart is vexed and drear:

But what is it to them
If he be fair or foul to see,
Since he is perfect joy to me.

He loves me well : the like do I i
I do not look with half an eye,
But seek to pleasure him.

From all the rest I choose him here;
I want no other for my dear :

How then should he displease
Those who may leave him if they please?

God keep him from all fear !

A stormier burst of indignation escapes from
the lips of a man who has been slandered to his
mistress This lyric, in pure literary quality, is
one of the best of the collection :

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 14$

They lied, those lying traitors all,
Disloyal, hypocritical,

Who feigned that I spake ill of thee !

Heed not their words of charity ;
For they are flatterers tongued with gall,
And liars all.

They make the tales that they let fall,
Coining falsehoods, wherewithal

They swear that I spake ill of thee :

Heed not their lies of charity ;
For they are flatterers tongued with gall,
And liars all.

Believe them not, although they call
Themselves thy servants; one and all,
They lie, or God's curse light on me! —
Whatever oaths they swear to thee,
Or were they thrice as stout and tall,
They're liars all!

After quoting two stanzas of another song, it
will be time to quit these ditties of the spring
and love :

O nightingale of woodland gay,

Go to my love and to her tell

That I do love her passing well;
And bid her also think of me,
For I to her will bring the may.

The may that I shall bring will be,

Nor rose nor any opening flower;

But with my heart I will her dower;
And kisses on her lips I'll lay,
And pray God keep her heartily.

K

146 MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS

I can only find one true ballad, in our sense
of the word, among these songs. It refers to
some tradition about a girl whose sweetheart
was a prisoner in her father's castle, and who
died when he was brought forth to be hanged.

Maid Marjory sits at the castle gate :

With groans and sighs

She weeps and cries :
Her grief it is great.

Her father asks, " Daughter, what is your wot ?
Seek you a husband or lord I trow ? "
" Let husbands be I

Give my love to me,
Who pines in the dungeon dark below I "

" I' faith, my daughter, thou'lt long want him;
For he hangs to-morrow when dawn is dim."

"Then bury my corpse at the gallows' feet ;
And men will say, they were true lovers sweet."

The raciest of these Norman songs are drink-
ing-catches. I find, however, that the lightest
and best of them are untranslateable. The
delicacy of the French refrains cannot be pre-
served ; the sound of laughter in their facile
lines escapes ; the gossamer-thread of sense,
so lightly spun, is loosened. One satire
upon female topers admits of rendering into
English. It is curious artistically, by reason of
its pertinacious monotony in rhyming. As a

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 14?

picture of manners one may compare it With the
scene of Noah's wife and her gossips in the
Miracle plays. Similar lyrics occur in Provencal
and early Italian poetry. But I think the finest
specimen of the type is this :

Drink, gossips mine ! we drink no wine.
They were three wives that had one heart for wine ;
One to the other said — We^drink no wine !

Drink, gossips mine I we drink no wine.

Drink, gossips mine t we drink no wine
The varlet stood in jerkin tight and fine
To serve the dames with service of good wine.

Drink, gossips mine ! we drink no wine.

Drink, gossips mine ! we drink no wine.
These wives they cried — Here's service of good wine I
Make we good cheer, nor stint our souls of wine !

Drink, gossips mine ! we drink no wine.

Drink, gossips mine t we drink no wine.
The gallant fills, nor seeketh further sign,
But crowns the cups with service of good wine.

Drink, gossips mine ! we drink no wine.

Drink, gossips mine I we drink no wine.
Singing beginneth, and sweet notes combine
With joyance to proclaim the praise of wine !

Drink, gossips mine I we drink no wine.

Drink, gossips mine t we drink no wine.
For fear of husbands will we never pine ;
They are not here to mar the taste of wine.

Drink, gossips mine I we drink no wine.

148 MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

What sort of songs were sung at these con-
vivial meetings appears from another Bacchic
melody which follows : —

Sweet comrades, fellows of the vine !
Drink we by morn and eve, drink wine—

A cask or so;

Ha, ho!
Nor will we pay our host one jot,

Save a credo !

But if our host sue us therefor,
We'll tell him he must pass it o'er

Quasimodo :

Ha, ho/
Nor will we pay our host one jot,

Save a credo/

The jolliest of all the topers of the Val de
Vire was Oliver Basselin, who lived in the reign
of Louis XII., and was killed by the English.
The song which follows alludes to his death, and
to the sadness which it cast over the pleasant
company of Vire : —

Alas/ good Oliver Basselin/

Shall we of you no more hear tell ?
And have the English killed you then?

You once were wont to sing your songs
And live, I ween, right joyously,

Joining in all the jolly throngs
Throughout the land of Normandy.

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 149

Far as St. Lo in Cotentin,

Mid fellows fair, as I hear tell,
No pilgrim like to him was seen.

The English they have done great wrong

Unto the fellows of Van. de Vire ;
No more shall you hear voice or song
From those who once sang all the year.

To God with stout heart pray we will,
And to Queen Mary, that sweet maid,

To bring the English to all ill:
The Father's curse on them be laid.

The animosity against the English bursts out
with even a fiercer growl of rage in some ballads
composed expressly upon the ravages inflicted
by Henry V.'s soldiery. One patriotic song,
with a fine rolling lilt in the line, refers to
the death of the hero of Agincourt, and also to
the siege of Harfleur, after which Henry expelled
the Norman inhabitants and planted in their
stead an Anglo-Saxon colony. It further com-
memorates the exploits of Captain Pregent de
Bidoulx, commander of the French warships in
1513, who defended the coast of Normandy
from British invaders. Allusion is made in
line 7 to the English custom of wearing the
hair long, and the name Godar or Godan in
line 12 appears to be a corruption of Goddam,
the traditional French appellation of an English-
man :

150 MEDIMVAL NORMAN SONGS

The English king himself of late let call

The king of France by style and proclamation :
His cursed will it was to summon all

Good Frenchmen forth from out their land and

nation.
Now is he dead at St. Fiacre en Brie:

From land of France the churls are ousted quite;

There sneaks no English pig-tailed cur in sight :
Cursed be their race and lineage all, say we.

They shipped their battle all upon the sea,

With store of biscuit and each knave a can;
And so by sea to Biscay merrily

Sailed they to crown their little king Godan.
But all their doing was but idle play,

So well hath Captain Pregent made them skip;

Foundered they are by land and eke on ship :
Cursed by their race and lineage all, say we.

The next has been called the Marseillaise of
the Norman peasantry. Even in the original
it dees not deserve so high-sounding a title,
yet the stanzas are interesting for their rustic
flavour and for the touches of unconscious
humour, which season the deadly hatred they
express : —

Good folk of village, thorp, and hail,

Who love the French king well,
Take heart of courage, each and «//,

To fight the English fell.

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 151

Seize each his pruning-hook and hoe

To top them root and branch;
A nd if you cannot make them go,

Shew a sour countenance.

Fear not to grapple with them close.

These Goddams, guts of grease ;
For one of us for four of those,

Or three, is match with ease.

By God, if I could clutch them here —

And by this oath I stand —
I'd shew them, without feint or fear,

How heavy is my hand.

Nor pig nor goose in all the shire
Have they left far or wide :

Nor fowl nor fowl-house by the byre-
God send them evil tide !

Another ballad, complaining, in like rustic
fashion, of oppression and extortion, may pos-
sibly refer to English rapine, but more likely to
the rapacity of feudal bailiffs and tax-collectors.
Commentators differ about the " court vestus " in
line 9.

In the Duchy of Normandy
Pillage reigns and thievery;

Of wealth and goods there is no store :
God grant us respite presently,
Or each man, as he may, must flee,

And leave his home for evermore*

152 MEDIAEVAL NORMAN SONGS

As for me, 1 will not stay;

For there is left nor ease nor cheer,
By reason of the shortcoats ; they

Too often come my door anear.

The knaves, with foul discourtesy,
Ask us to give when nought have we,

And eke they cudgel us full sore :
Nathless, what boots it but that we
Should pray, " Good sirs, of charity,

Tak all we have! What have we mort?

Right willingly would I pay toll
If aught I had wherewith to pay,

But all my wealth, upon my soul,
And all my goods, are given away.

I cannot show them courtesy
By reason of grim penury,

Which keepeth me a bondman poor :
Nor friend nor lover dear have I
In France nor yet in Normandy

To aid with alms my beggared store.

God grant that peace and law might sway
Through Christendom on every side;

Yea, grant us peace to last alway ;
So might we all secure abide.

If Christendom at one might be,
Then should we live right joyously,

And shut on grief the prison door:
God curse them who make woes, to bet
And eke the blessM Maid Mary,

Withouten hope for evermore.

MEDIEVAL NORMAN SONGS 153

I will add the full title of the volume to which
I am indebted for the songs I have translated.
It is "Chansons Normandes du xvme siecle,
publiees pour la Iere fois sur les manuscrits de
Bayeux et de Vire avec introduction et notes
de A. Gaste. Caen : Le Gost-Clerisse, Rue
Ecuyere 36. 1866."

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

FAR away in the valley the wind raved ; and
ever and anon it lashed the panes, whirling up
powdery sleet, or bellowed in the chimney. All
the middle space of sky had been swept bare by
the hurricane. A net of vapour hid the moon,
through which she cast a glaring blurred light
upon the frozen scene. Beneath lay the city,
as clear as in daytime. The church-towers
black against the garish snow — their tops and
the roof of every house piled with snow, while
the dark fronts of buildings traced the course of
street and quay and winding river. Far beyond,
the hills stood tall and white and spectral,
divided by the black lines of their hedgerows.
As I gazed, they seemed in that turmoil of tem-
pest to shiver and grow taller and then shrink
again, and again to move toward me from their
basements. Down there in the town a myriad
of twinkling gusty lamps danced and flickered
like stars upon a frosty night, except that their

156 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

light was redder. Our cypresses and tulip-trees
and beeches kept grinding and clanging at every
wrench of the blast ; and sometimes a bough,
all bare and dry, was whirled across the window-
panes and carried far into the darkness, to be
embedded in some distant snow-wreath. All
this commotion suggested no thrill of life, no
passion. The stolid, pale-faced, blear-eyed
heavens and earth seemed lashed by a vindic-
tive fury of dead impersonal force. How
different was this from the same landscape
last July ! Then, after a sleepless night, I
rose to watch the dawn between three and four
o'clock. Golden light flooded the eastern hills,
and came gloriously falling on my bedroom
walls, as though the sun were rising for me
alone. For there was an almost awful stillness,
through which the messenger of day arrived.
The birds who had been chirping since the
darkness of the dawn, were hushed. No sound
of human step or wheel or rustling tree disturbed
the silence — nothing but the Cathedral clock
striking a half-hour. Domed thunder-clouds,
sheeted with gold around their moulded edges,
went sailing ponderously eastward, and amber
ripplings glimmered beneath them from the
water amid those many masts of ships between
the houses. These movements of the travelling
clouds and sparkling river alone suggested

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 157

activity, and life was barely indicated by smoke
curling from three glass-houses. There I knew
that the fires had been kept awake all night by
watchers, who listened to the roar of the black
chimneys, crying like myself, " Would God that
it were morning ! "

I

He was all beautiful : as fair
As summer in the silent trees;
As bright as sunshine on the leas;
As gentle as the evening air.

His voice was swifter than the lark;
Softer than thistle-down his cheek;
His eyes were stars that shyly break
At sundown ere the skies are dark.

I found him in a lowly place
He sang clear songs that made me weep ,
Long nights he ruled my soul in sleep :
Long days I thought upon his face.

II

" A lone : and must it then be so ?
IV hy do you walk alone ? " she cried.
I answered with a smile, to hide
The undercurrent of my woe.

158 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

But had she known, dear /fiend, that thou
A rt living still, she would have said :
"Oblivion should but shroud the dead;
Go, throw thy arms around him now ! "

Then on my lips the smile had died :
" From deep to deeper depths I sink ;
They bade me leave him on the brink,
And now hell's gulfs our paths divide."

Ill

This time it is no dream that stirs
The ancient fever of my brain :
The burning pulses throb again,
The thirst I may not quench recurs.

In vain I tell my beating heart
How poor and worthless were the prize:
The stifled wish within me dies,
But leaves an unextinguished smart.

It is not for the love of God
That I have done my soul this wrong;
}Tis not to make my reason strong
Or curb the currents of my blood.

But sloth, and fear of men, and shame
Impose their limit on my bliss :
Else had I laid my lips to his,
And called him by love's dearest name.

I walked with friends to the wood of Druid
Stoke. The clouds were like alabaster in the

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 159

windless sky ; sunlight pouring from them with
mild intensity and silvery clearness. There we
found snowdrops, tall, delicate, and white,
among mosses and green ivy. The corymbs of
the ivy on those walls of oolite are still ripe, fit
to crown fervid brows of amber-skinned Diony-
sus. The little stream which threads that wood
was swollen with rain, and went brawling be-
tween grassy banks through cresses with a
pretty childish babble. On the fir-trees by the
road to Sea-Mills rested very golden light ; and
there we found red jew's-ears in the hedges.
Emerging from the wood into the lowland by the
Avon was like passing bodily into a mellow
picture by some Dutch painter. The landscape
gradually gained in breadth, and when we
reached the towing-path, there were for us far-
reaching intimations of the sea. Seaweed clings
to bits of rock, close beneath oak-boughs and ivy
roots, which go creeping downwards to tide-
level, and meet the fucus sent up from the sea to
seed and grow there. Woodland and wave kiss
one another strangely in the peace of those in-
flowing and receding brackish waters. As we
travelled homewards, what wealth of gold and
fire and crimson was there abroad on rocks and
trees and clouds, what azure of the sky, cloven
by those radiant cliffs ! Dundry, far away, that
long> low, undulating line of hill, stood clear

160 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

with snow. Steamers splashed panting up and
down, fretting a mimic sea. When at length
we climbed to Durdham Down, there lay out-
spread before us glory beyond all glory. East-
ward, a mountain range of cloud, stationary,
based on blue foundations, towering through all
gradations of purple valleys, of crimsoned alps,
of golden lights contrasted with pink shadows on
ascending ridges, up to one crowning pinnacle of
purest snow. In the west rose a jagged castle-
wall, fringed with flame, broken with a breach
through which the last rays shot ineffable
radiance into calm green spaces of the sky, and
smote pavilions of frail floating clouds above.
All this sky-scape was cloud — cloud such as I
have rarely seen, so steeped in colour, so fan-
tastical in shape, so majestic in proportions.

IV

The gale is up, and far away
It comes o'er changeful sea and sand,
Where that dim distant borderland
Stands clear and doffs her mist to-day.

The broad brown woods are close to view ;
Their crests are fringed with orange sky,
And here a beech all russet dry,
And here a black rock-pluming yew.

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 161

The river swirls with muddy flow ;
The wild white sea-gulls screaming sail
Round point and headland on the gale,
Down to the channel's golden glow.

Far up in air the homeward rooks
Float dense against the liquid sky :
They hear the woods beneath them cry,
They mark the swelling of the brooks.

Faint heart, why sad ? They flout the breeze,
They care not though their nests be torn;
They laugh the drenching showers to scorn i
Wilt thou not wing thy way like these ?

The chimes upon this troubled air
Went sighing, sobbing to the night.
Day drew the curtain from the light,
And left the new year bleak and bare.

A heaven inpenetrably black;
Earth sullen, hard, and well defined :
No ho^e above ; the clouds are blind,
A nd from the East fast whirls the wrack

VI

The stately ships are passing free,
Where scant light strikes along the flood;
Gaunt winter scowls o'er field and wood ?
O who will bring my love to me ?

L

i6a CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

White gulls fly screaming to the sea;
The bitter east wind sweeps the sky ;
Faint snow streaks on the hill-sides lie}
O who will bring my love to me ?

The hawthorn bough is bare and dree;
The spiky holly keeps him warm;
Brown brake, shrills shivering in the storm :
O who will bring my love to me ?

The bright blue sky is cold to see;
The frosty ground lies hard and bare ;
So cold is hope, so hard is care :
O who will bring my love to me ?

Low on the horizon, beyond Durdham Down,
were streaks of white light, wavering spokes and
flaring lines and streamers, flushing into faint rose-
pink. Could the buried sunlight still be felt so
late into a night of May ? Soon, by quiverings
and motions in these signs — for the west dark-
ened, and flames burst forth among the topmost
stars, and toward the east ran swords, stealthily
creeping across the heavenly spaces — I knew
that this was an Aurora Borealis. The pageant
rapidly developed, and culminated with dramatic
vividness. At the very zenith, curving downward
to the Great Bear, there shone a nebulous semi-
circle— phosphorescent, with stars tangled in it.
From this crescent of light were effused to north
and west and east rays, bands, foam-flakes, belts,
spears, shafts of changeful hues, now rosy red,

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 163

now brightening into amethyst, now green, now
pale as ashes. The whole was in slow and solemn
movement, like lightning congealed, which has
not ceased to throb. As glaciers are to running
water, so were these auroral flames to the
quiverings of lightning. In the midst of all the
glow and glory sparkled Ursa Major, calm and
frosty. Other stars seemed to wander in the
haze, as I have seen them in a comet's tail.
The most wonderful point in the pageant was
when the crescent flamed into intensely brilliant
violet. Then it faded ; the whole heaven for a
few moments flushed with diffused rose ; but the
show was over. That supreme flash recalled the
pulsing and rutilant coruscations with which
Tintoretto spheres his celestial messengers. I
could have fancied the crescent and its meteoric
emanations to have been the shield of an arch-
angel. On Monte Generoso last spring we
watched a sunset of great beauty. Thunder-clouds
hung over the extreme heights of Monte Rosa,
stationary, like the up-spread wing of a seraph
who had plunged headlong down the western
steep of flame. All the rest of him was hidden
by the mountain : only this one wing, fretted
with grain of gold and crimson and deep blue,
pointed skyward. And restlessly against the
gorgeous glow behind it shot lightning flashes,
as though an angelic sword behind the hills were

i 64 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

doing dreadfully. Well, the auroral shield was
fit buckler for this seraph.

Clifton, now as ever, is full of vague yet
powerful associations. When will this Circe
cease to brew enchantments for my soul ? The
trees and streets and distant views of down and
valley keep saying to me as I walk, " Put upon
your heart the dress which we have woven for
you ; you will wear it, whether you like or not ;
palpitate, aspire, recalcitrate as you may, here it
is waiting for you ! "

VII

/ saw a vision of deep eyes

In morning sleep when dreams are true:

Wide humid eyes of hazy blue,

Like seas that kiss the horizon skies.

Then as I gazed, I felt the rain
Of soft warm curls around my cheek,
And heard a whisper low and meek :
"/ love, and canst thou love again?"

A gentle youth beside me bent;
His cool moist lips to mine were pressed,
That throbbed and burned with love's unrest:
When, lo, the powers of sleep were spent ;

And noiseless on the airy wings
That follow after night's dim way,
The beauteous boy was gone for aye,
A theme of vague imaginings.

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 165

Yet I can never rest again :
The flocks of morning dreams are true ;
A nd till I find those eyes of blue
And golden curls, I walk in pain.

VIII

Spring comes again : the blushing earth
Will deck herself with bridal flowers :
The birds among the leafy bowers
Will wake dumb winter's woods with mirth.

But I shall never find him, never :
Though winter's snow dissolve in dew,
And hyacinth's star-spangled blue
'Neath vernal breezes bend and shiver.

The field shall throb with marriage hymn,
And summer's wealth shall deck the grove,
Wherethrough my feet must lonely rove,
Disconsolately seeking him.

Seek on, seek on, till autumn dies
Like sunset in drear winter's night ;
Seek on, seek on, for thy delight,
A mirage dream, before thee flies.

Brackets of grey rock jutting from the solid
cliff, and shaded by the white leaves of the service-
trees. From these perches the eye can plunge
into the massy woods beneath. Birches fledging

r66 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

the precipice, feathery ashes, tall limes and glossy
oaks mingle the billows of their verdant crests and
fill the hollow of the valley. Sometimes a wood-
pigeon, pale in sunlight, blue in shadow, passes.
The sunlight streams along the ravine, casts
purple shade upon the river, strikes in flame
against the rich red rocks beyond. The Avon
is crowded with ships and boats and steamers.
These enliven the waters, ploughing up its
solemn shadows and many-hued reflections.
Have you noticed that reflections in a stream are
more intensely coloured than real objects ? The
mingling reds and greens upon the river here
glow like veined marble. Broken by moving
prows into ribs and furrows of shivered opal-
escence, while the blue sky gleams back from
the shadowed sides of wavelets, these many-
tinted radii flank the black bulk of sea-going
vessels like fins of gorgeous sea-dragons.

Leigh Woods are as beautiful as when I
roamed in them three years ago. The lights fall
still as golden on those grey recks streaked with
red, on the ivy and the glossy trees, the ferns
and heather and enchanter's nightshade. This
loveliness sinks into my soul now as it did then.
But it does not stir me so profoundly or pain-
fully. I do not feel the unassuaged hunger of
the soul so deeply.

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 167

IX

The tide is high, and stormy beams
Of sunlight scud across the down :
A bove, the cloudy squadrons frown ;
On their broad front a rainbow gleams.

Cease, boisterous wind. The west is grey
With glory-coated mists, that swell
From distant seas, and gathering tell
Of coming storm and darkened day.

Leave the dank clouds to droop, and guide
Toward their fair port yon sleeping sails :
Close-furled they wait the wakening gales;
Shower-sprinkled shines the pennon wide.

Sail seaward, stately ship, and view
Some bless/d isle where love is bred.
Bring me again my love that's dead,
And all I have I'll give to you.

The magic of divine spring sunlight is again
abroad. The clearings in Leigh Woods are
sheets of bluebells. The service-trees upon the
cliffs have expanded their white under-leafage,
with thick bosses of blossom honey-sweet ; burly,
big-bodied, furry bees, banded black and red,
swaying helplessly, and swinging their unwieldy
carcasses in air, hum drunken with honeydew and
white bloom above and underneath and all
around.

i68 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

My own loved Clifton, jocund May
Hath decked thy banks and bowers again;
Thy populous elms that crowd the plain,
Thy birches, fountains of green spray.

Once more I pace the lonesome woods,
I hear the thrush and cuckoo call,
I hear the tinkling raindrops fall,
I smell the scent of hidden buds.

Star-spangled bluebell heavens are spread
'Neath silky screens of tender beech ;
The yews their dewy fingers reach
To lay them on the lily bed.

All that is fair, and sweet, and gay,
All brightest germs of happy thought,
To-day their freshest gifts have brought
To crown the brows of laughing May.

But I am lone, and sad, and dull,
My brain is sick, my heart is dry;
A weary longing dims the sky,
With bitter want my soul is full.

Oh, wherefore, wherefore, is he gone?
He made my life one living spring;
My heart was then a joyous thing,
And brightened when the sunbeams shonti

I see the light, I see the flowers ;
The trees are tremulous with praise;
One craving darkens all my days;
Dead love hath dulled the jocund hours,

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 169

XI

It seems as though these years of pain
Had never made me man from boy.
So keenly do I feel the joy
That breathes in wakening spring again.

The rooks complain of coming showers;
The sharp fresh morning breezes blow ;
The sunbeams on the river glow,
And kiss the brows of misty towers;

While I along our terrace stray,
I count the shadows on the lawn,
The clouds across the azure drawn
In dappled films of white and grey.

All silent signs of spring are rife :
My heart leaps up to hail the hours,
That guerdon bring of vernal flowers,
And swell our veins with love and life.

I leap, I cry, " O summer, trace
Thy hues along the deepening wood,
Thy fleecy vapours on the flood,
Thy lush green grasses o'er the chase.

" O summer, come ! Voluptuous queen,
Bright mistress of a magic wand !
And stir me with thy fairy hand,
A nd make me what I once have been i

" For spring is fresh on mead and hill,
As fresh as those three Aprils gone;
But all my life is dead and wan,
My pulst of love is cold and still.

170 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

" I count the shadow, count the cloud,
And hail the growth of silent days;
But there were other notes of praise,
With which those springtide hours were loud.

" They sounded in the windy strife,
I heard them in the dim starlight,
They shouted through the landscape bright,
They made me one with nature's life."

We clambered down the cliffs, and bruised
young fennel-shoots and' marjoram and thyme
and the many aromatic mints and celeries that
grow there. We saw the thorns in bloom, and
the light upon the hanging birches of Leigh
Woods, and the jackdaws glistening from shade
to sunlight, as of old. Ships came up the Avon
at our feet ; we could almost touch the pennons
waving from their masts. Then we wandered on
the downs, whence we could see the channel,
silvery-grey like a lake, with film behind film of
Welsh hills traced upon the blue beyond. All
was so calm, so clear, that the eye might trace
elm-masses on the farther marge of Severn, and
the hedgerows of the upland fields, with here and
there a patch of curling smoke.

XII

The light from yonder cliff is fled,
That y ester morn so brightly shone;
The glory of thy love hath gone
From my dulled life, and left it dead.

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 171

Let sunshine fade from rock and sky,
Let Leigh's deep woodland walks be torn;
O'er ruined woods I will not mourn,
Which once were green, when you and I

Went hand in hand among the flowers,
Whose names I taught you, and I made
Rare crowns of columbines to shade
With purple buds the golden showers

Of your loved curls. At times we hung
Like eagles o'er the dizzy rock,
Where faintly boomed the hammer's shock
And ever upward slowly swung

The sailor's melancholy chant;
While ships went gliding out to sea,
Sails furled and pennons floating free,
With sunlight on their sterns aslant;

Till evening yellowed over all
From Hesper in the dewy sky —
The woods may fall, I will not sigh ;
Love's star hath set, 'tis time they fall.

XIII

Three summers gone : and now once more
Pale autumn comes to pluck the leaf ;
On every hill they bind the sheaf ;
The oak-woods redden as of yore.

The woods may bronze ; the golden ears
May gladden all the land with grain;
But I shall never feel again
The gladness of those byegone years,

172 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

We climbed down the face of St. Vincent's
Rock by a path I know. The full moon was
partly hidden by heavy clouds, but the northern
sky held delicate green and pale-blue light, and
the moon poured oblique rays upon the river and
the woods. Then the clouds sailed slowly away,
and their edges were tinct with pearl and opal.
Spaces of crystalline azure, seas of glass, swam
between them, full-filled with moonlight and trem-
bling with scattered stars — stars scarcely seen in
that pellucid radiance — stars palpitating, throbbing
out breathless melodies. At length the moon
emerged, naked and round, glorious, midway
above the bridge, suspended in luminous twilight.
The cliff shone like marble in her plenilunar
splendour. But again the clouds gathered. A
vulture's head shot forward and swallowed the
moon's silver sphere. Again she triumphed ,
and this time the clouds dispersed in gauze and
filmy veils of faintest shell-like hues. Finally,
Queen Luna reigned in undisputed majesty.
And now I seemed to see choruses of svlph-
like shapes sailing on one side from the valley of
Nightingales, and on the other from the shadow
of St. Vincent's Rock, to meet and weave their
dances in the air ; and now an arm was thrust
from the Giant's Cave, which grew and grew
until the huge hand rested on my heart ; and
now furry paws of monsters from beneath were

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 173

laid upon the knoll beside me ; and now I saw
the blanched face of Lilith upturned imploring
from the smooth slope of the curving rock above ;
and then again came troops of shadows sweeping
down the path which we had traversed ; and yet
again the gleaming scales of dragons coiled and
twisted on the glittering mud-banks of Avon, and
all their massive jaws were raised to hiss.

After midnight I came home through the
avenue of Clifton churchyard, and emerged upon
the open space beyond. The valley of the Avon
was flooded with moonlight ; fleeces of almost
iridescent cloud hung to westward, and the sul-
phurous glare of Ashton furnaces sent out flame
and smoke into that liquid argent of moon-bathed
wood and hill and meadow.

XIV

How coldly steals the journeying night,
How silent sleeps the garden spray :
Far down I hear the watch-dog bay;
I hear the sheep from yonder height.
Swathed in thick mist the city lies :
Her lamps like myriad jewels peer
Through wreaths of vapour faintly clear ;
Her chimes from muffled belfries rise.
Pale as the moon is memory's light,
Those April days as darkly lower,
As looms mid yonder mist the tower,
Which then with rays of morn were bright.

174 CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE

I hear his voice like yon thin chimes ;
As those faint lamps his eyes are dim,
Deep midnight gloom encircles him,
Scarce can I dream of those dear times.

It is five o'clock in the morning. The sun has
not yet touched the horizon, but the sky is yellow,
barred with rose, and the morning star is shining
in pale blue above. The city lies wrapped in
thick white vapour ; only the towers of Redclyffe
and the Cathedral rising like black islands.
Here and there trees and grassy knolls emerge
from the level sea of mist. Our garden and the
distant hills are clear in garish light of morning.
The whole scene is very silent and asleep, chill
with dews, the foliage stiff with frosty lack of
warmth, the birds half waking. Thus, as with
life itself, only the great things remain distinct to
catch fading or growing lights of sunset or of
sunrise, while all around is blurred and indistinct.
Last evening the red blaze of the west fell upon
those towers with such splendour as memory
throws upon the past. This morning they stand
forth like ominous events to be — sorrow and death,
thick-shadowed, seen only by their certainty of
darkness. The past glows with a sunset flush
of poetry. The future is cold with sad features
sharply defined. But the past fades into indis-
tinctness, while the future broadens into perfect
clarity of day.

CLIFTON AND A LAD'S LOVE 175

XV

To thee far off, more far than death,
To thee I make my lonely rhyme,
Condemned to see thee not in time,
Though life and love still rule thy breath.

Our pulses beat, our hearts strike on;
They beat, but do not beat together;
Our years are young, but lusty weather
Wakes in our blood no unison.

We pace the self -same field and street,
We hear the same strong organ roll;
No music leaps from soul to soul,
Our paths are near, yet never meet.

Only in visions of the night
I seem with thee to watch the morn;
A tempest swells, and thou art borno
To lands I know not far from sight.

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

BUTTON COURT)

I

11 PER noctis vigilias clamavi, et lacrymis torum
meum irrigavi. Mane lucem spectare odi, e sub
vespere tenebras perhorreo. Ab urbe in rus,
solatium dolorisque lenimenta desiderans, effugi.
Mecum autem me portabam, nee mei met ipsius
desidiem deponere potui. Quod non est, quasro ;
quod est, fastidior ; praeterita respicio, nee tamen
laetabundus sum ; praesentia me cruciant ; futura
timeo. Amare nequeo quos amare debuissem.
Amore inamabili eorum quos amare nunquam po-
tuerim, ardeo. Erroris atque imbecillitatis mese
mihi conscius, non tamen me talibus e volutabris
evehere jam valeo. Lux me taedet, nox me terret,
libri fatigant, homines contemnunt. Nihil invenio
quod vulnus medeat, nihil quod sinu meo foveam,
nihil quod osculer, nihil quod precibus et votis

M

178 NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

colam. Erro miserabilis ; inter vivos mortuus ;
inter frutices alga ; inter Stellas caligo ; inter
dulciloquas volucres silentium ; inter amantes in-
vidia ; inter sapientes stultus ; inter felices in-
felix ; inter divites pauperrimus. Sine spe,
sine luce, sine viribus, sine animo, cur terram
onero ? "

In the afternoon I said, " This melancholy is
nigh to madness." And in truth, what with un-
healthy sleep by night and painful reflection by
day, I seem to be losing the power of living as
reason and will direct. Yet in the clear Sep-
tember sky, as I walked to Dundry and back,
misery fell from me like a burden. I gathered
from the hedgerow a long tendril of convolvulus
bronzed by sunlight and polished b}' the kisses
of the summer air. And this I twined about my
hat. Strange heart of man ! How we yearn
with fever after knowledge, and then sicken of
disgust for thought and speculation ! How we
sink numbed into week-long monotony, although
Nature surrounds us with beauty and love, and
then by some fine touch upon our senses wake
to sympathy with Fauns !
Sept. 1862.

We spend our days lazily and quietly, and
have as much sunshine as is common in the

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 179

West. Though it rains one day, the next
brings splendid clouds — domes and columns of
white alabaster moulded into the most stately
forms, and sailing slowly over the blue sky with
bars and tatters of grey vapour on their fronts.
To-day we sat in Broad Mead, looking up at
them and watching a herd of cattle. Twenty-
nine were browsing in front of us, with heads
bent down and tails lazily switching off the flies.
One heard them feeding as they cropped the grass
and champed it in their mouths. I thought of
Wordsworth's line :

There are forty feeding like one.

We had rambled through the lanes and fields
to Stanton Drew, over the clover, by hedgerows
tangled thick with briony — black, yellow, and
green-berried. When we reached " the stones,"
as they call them here, we sat down in the inner
circle of the Druid's temple. It was a pleasant
scene — the masses of red crystalline rock,
overgrown with moss and lichen, standing in a
ring about the centre of the field. Other re-
mains of broken circles lie about the meadow,
some thrown down and some erect, some perfect
and some shattered, but all picturesquely purple
and gigantic. Pigmy English cows were grazing
near us, and a little rustic stream, belted with

i8o NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

alders and aspens, ran silently at one end of the
field. Behind us rose the church-tower and a
manor-house, and above all the marble pinnacles
and bubbles of the clouds. C. said the whole
scene seemed to say " Summer." On a distant
hill stretched cornfields, yellow, and ready for the
harvest, with green hedges running round and
through their cloth of gold. The sounds of
country-folk speaking to their cattle and of dogs
from the farm-yards came to us in the stillness.

Yesterday we took another walk of the same
kind. Edward drove us to Chew-Magna, and
from there we walked to Dundry. We found
ferns in the quarries, and looked down on
Bristol, a fairy city in the valley of the Avon.
It is pleasant walking here with C. We both of
us love to search for wild flowers, and from some
high hill to gaze on " distant colour, happy
hamlet " — the blue Mendips with their robe of
wood and few faint towers and villages. In the
narrow lanes we stop to examine what she calls
" Nature's vulgar embroidery " — ferns, violet
leaves, great bunches of the red Guelder-rose-
berries, enchanter's nightshade, white bindweed,
marsh-mallow, and cascades of clematis. I re-
member wandering here alone three autumns
ago. How I bowed myself in anguish on Dun-
dry hill, and walking home crowned myself with
black briony leaves, and forgot my wish to die.

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 181

In the night I dreamed that I met Willie at
the door of the Cathedral — as he used to be,
and as I used to be — but years had passed away,
and we had not seen each other. He said with
his eyes, " Friend, have you come at last ? I
have waited for you as a watcher waiteth for the
morning " — his old words. He took me by the
hand, and we sat together in an aisle and heard
windy chaunts sweep through the darkness as in
days gone by. I woke up well, and it was
morning.

To-day we have been at Cheddar. It was
quite dull and cloudy when we left, but the sun
came out on Mendip, and shone brightly all the
rest of the day. The rocks at Cheddar deserve
their fame for picturesqueness. The gorge is so
narrow and so well proportioned that the 480 feet
of cliff might stand for as many thousands. The
windings of the road continually open out fresh
beauties, and aid to create an illusion of vastness.
In some places the columns, spires, and bastions
of rock impend and topple with an oppressive
menace on the road. What Cheddar wants is
water. It is absolutely voiceless. With a few
cascades and a torrent running beneath the road,
it might resemble an Alpine pass. I thought oi
Wordsworth's lines on Gondo. " The unfettered
clouds and region of the heavens," the "winds
thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn," weic

1 82 NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

there ; but no " black drizzling crags that spake
by the wayside as if a voice were in them," no
" stationary blasts of waterfalls," no " sick sight
and giddy prospect of the raving stream." With
eyes accustomed to the Alps, one was always
longing for a foot or so of unmistakable snow-
summit above the limestone, to make one feel that
the crowning patches of bright grass were the
beginning of pastures leading up to glacier and
tracts of ice. Yet this ravine is in no sense Swiss.
It is more like the Saxon Switzerland, still more
like some road across the Apennines — that gorge
beyond Urbino on the way to Gubbio, for instance
— but really sui generis. This is its charm. The
veins of ivy clinging to the highest spires, the
fern-fledged basements, the rock-pluming yew
trees, and the silence of the calm grey cliffs, be-
long to Somersetshire. I climbed one side of the
valley, and saw Sedgmoor beyond, with Glaston-
bury Tor and the broad champaign stretching
to the Severn. C. and I went down into a
cave. The drapery of stalactite is very beautiful.
It hangs in transparent masses like the folds of
an Ionic chiton. The lights, too, in the cavern
are so variously disposed about its strange re-
cesses, that one seems to be looking at the work
of fairy masons and sculptors, lit by fairy lamps.
This afternoon C. has been sketching and I
watching her. We sat in the field opposite the

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 183

house, just where the ground falls away to the
gully. In old times the stream made a lake
here, and hollowed out a great bed for itself with
shelving sides. Now it has retreated, leaving a
green sward that slopes by gentle undulations
to the gully. Trees have grown up round the
water, oaks above with gnarled arms lichen-grey,
alders beneath, and elfin ashes rising like spirits
with frail stems and pallid tresses from the
deeper green. Over the grass a light of laughing
flowers is spread — not violets now, but crocuses,
lilac and white, which do not fear the sun, but
spread their faces broadly to his rays. How
they glow ! red in the sunlight and pale purple
in the shadows, each a perfect form. Lady's
tresses, like fairy wands, hung with pearly bells,
odorous and dewy, stand among blue milkwort
blossoms, and on every hawkweed rests an azure
butterfly. There are multitudes here. The rooks,
ever so far away, high up in the sky, caw faintly.
The air is loud with humming flies. Pink cloud-
lets scarcely move across the blue, which is no
darker than the white part of a beauty's eye.
The whole field undulates and ripples like a sea
in ages far ago, before Atlantics and Pacifies
were divided, and when the ocean waves went
round the world. Each billow is gigantic, and
the grass shines like an Alpine pasture i-n the
sun. Elm shadows fall athwart these undula-

1 84 NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

tions, and the restless fretwork of ash branches,
with ponderous darkness from the brooding
oaks.

All this I saw. But to me now a primrose is
a primrose and a field a field. " For this, for
everything, I am out of tune." Why so, faint
heart ? A sore brain, bad thoughts, and discon-
tent. I would not so much mind if I could do
my work. But even there I fail. I toiled at
Marston's comedies to-day, and wrote such anti-
quated nonsense. Crambe repetita is nothing to
my salad, which consists of the very refuse of
a kitchen-garden gathered from a dustheap and
served up with ashes.

I know that this land is passing fair ; but I
am not a part of it. The hushed stillness of the
hanging woods, the dells in which Pan cools him-
self in noontide heat among rank ferns and dripping
mosses, the pendulous abeles, the free spring of tall
aspiring limes affording pasture to a million bees,
the indescribable low sounds which Nature makes
alone unto herself, half melodies, music without
a thought, all preluding to man ; the quick rush
of water over stones by reeds and cresses in the
brook, the crowns of briony which Dryads
weave, the clematis which braids thick-berried
banks, the gossamers where fairies swing and
whistle to the bats their steeds, glowworms
hanging out faint lamps to lure ethereal suitors,

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 185

like Moore's ladies whom the angels loved, white
mists at morning and cold dews at night, the
multitudinous stars, unchanging galaxies and
glimmering constellations, the low voice of birds
before the sun slants upward from the under-
world, the magnificent swoop and twitter of the
swallow, faint crescents of young moons in liquid
skies — I used to know and love them all.

August 1869.

Ill

We are just at the end of a fortnight's visit at
Sutton Court. The weather has not favoured
us. We have only had one really fine day.
During the rest of the time one long succession
of westerly gales has brought wind and rain
in hurricanes across the sky, and we have stayed
indoors, escaping to the fields by runs and
sallies in the intervals of sunshine. Yet this
very intermittency of fine weather is most
beautiful. If I were inclined to write a study
of Somersetshire, the place would supply me
with plenty of motives and of pretty pictures.
It is a true realisation of the ideal primitive
English Country, where railways have not yet
penetrated, where the corn-land is still allowed
to have its fallow yeai, and the hedges stretch
unpruned across the fields in spite of modern

186 NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

farming. These fields are, each in itself, a
perfect picture — in spring-time yellow with cow-
slips, in autumn purple with crocuses; and
the hedges line them with sweet violets, and
primroses, and hyacinths in April, yielding to
summer flowers — bindweed, and clematis, and
mallow, and wild roses, and St. John's wort —
until August brings the scarlet briony berries,
and arum bunches of red fruit, and fluffy thistles,
and ripe hazels and blackberries. In and out
among the bushes grow tangles of enchanter's
nightshade, and brake, and hart's tongue, and
herb-robert, and broad-feathery ferns. They are
a kingdom for the children, lining the green
pastures and the deeply cloven lanes — lanes
which once were watercourses, and still wind
between the slopes of rising hills. Alders and
oaks wave over them, and in their cool depth all
things are turned "to a green thought in a
green shade." The earth in them is mostly of
a dark red, and the cottage walls, which are
hidden at the turns and angles of the bosky
dells, by little rivulets and copses of hazel, show
white fronts, jessamine and rose-embowered,
against dark boughs. One farm, which is called
" Moorledge," seems quite lost and forgotten in a
maze of winding leafy lanes and undulating
fields, interpreting its own name by the near
proximity of rush-grown common land, where

NOTES OF .A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 187

the geese run cackling on a windy day. Then
there are the "gullies," so called in Somerset-
shire ; other counties call them " bourns," or
"chines," or " goyles," or "ghylls;" the
bowery courses of little streams, cut in the
bosom of the open fields, and grown with every
kind of tree — alder, wych-elm, hazel, and oak,
and slender ash. By their brinks the briar and
burdock, the hemlock and wild rose, the service
tree and maple cluster in a leafy jungle, odorous
with aromatic herbs, and bright with butterflies,
and loud with humming bees. Kingfishers and
waterfowl haunt the reeds that grow beneath ;
and where the water spreads itself into pools,
there spring tall bulrushes and beautiful pink
willow-herbs and purple loosestrife. To the
edge of these ponds come the cattle ; for every
field is full of grazing kine — the wealth and pride
of the country. You see them feeding by scores,
gathering at noontide under the spreading boughs
of oak or beech in the centre of the meadow, or
lowing in the evening on their way to being
milked. Nor is the country all so purely
pastoral. There is Dundry with its high-towered
church, sacred to St. Michael, commanding that
view across Bristol and the valley of the Avon,
over to Severn and the hills of Wales — a bleak
beacon-height, never quiet from the turbulent
wind. There is Mendip, IOOO feet above the

1 88 NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

sea, wooded at its base and springing to open
moorland, a bare upland swept by the winter
gales, where trees are bent to eastward, puny
thorns and a few stubborn oaks, and where the
barren fields are separated from each other by
stone walls. The ridge of Mendip is always
hazy with Atlantic mists and watery west-winds ;
great clouds seem always forming on its brow,
with hazy outlines and brief interspace of bright
blue sky — true sea-clouds, gathered far away,
and blown by restless south-west gales across
the fertile plains. This is why Somersetshire is
so rich a pasture-land.

The moisture never fails, and the sun is warm
enough to make it foster every kind of herb,
and grass, and tree. Autumn is the time for
apple-harvest, when you see in every orchard
boys and girls shaking the red and golden fruit
down to the rank grass below. Baskets, and
rakes, and ladders lie about beneath the trees,
and a sound of laughing, and of rustling boughs,
and of apples pattering like a hailstorm, rings
through the home-garth. Then you find a heap
of ruddy pippins and brown russettings laid in the
darkness of a barn, with mellow October sunlight
falling on them through the chinks, while the
cider-press is turned outside, and the thick pulpy
juice comes foaming into vats and jars. Autumn
is the time for apple-harvest, summer for hay-

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 189

making. There is little corn to cut or ground to
till ; for pasture is the wealth and beauty of the
land. The village must not be forgotten — Stowey,
with its thatches and bright gardens, its noble
beeches and elms about the little church, its cot-
tage doors embowered in deadly nightshade to pro-
tect the house from witchcraft. Nor yet the Court
— stately avenues, and terraces, and gardens —
homelike, and primitive, and unassuming, where
everything is so green that you cannot say where
garden ends and fields begin, what is natural and
what is the result of art. To the north stretches
an ancient avenue of elms, the haunt of rooks —
to the south an avenue of limes, the summer
home of innumerable bees, and wood-pigeons, and
night-flying owls. The Court itself has a long
and curious pedigree. Leland says that in the
reign of Edward III. one John de Sutton held
half a knight's fee, and to him belonged in all
probability the tower which forms the oldest and
most central building of the Court. It has three
storeys ; the lowest was where they penned the
cattle ; the second formed the living and the eating
place for masters and men ; in the third they slept ;
and on the roof was the watch-tower, beacon
bracket, and crenellations for defence. To this
tower in times of greater security was added a
large hall, square, roomy, with an ample porch
and deep bay windows, and minstrels' gallery

igo NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

above the dais, and yawning chimney : beyond the
hall in process of time was placed on one side the
kitchen, on the other side the solar room or sunny
parlour. The old archways of the hall have Gothic
mouldings, showing them to have preceded Tudor
times. Before these alterations were effected, the
St. Loes, a knightly family of the West, now quite
extinct, had become possessors of the Court.
Their arms are carved on the stonework of the
kitchen window. From the St. Loes it passed in
the reign of Elizabeth to the Countess of Salisbury,
building Bess of Hardwick, who married a St. Loe
for her last husband. She added a chapel to the
Court, and made other substantial alterations
which have subsisted till this day. After her it
came into the possession of the Stracheys.
During all its changes the Court has never
entirely lost the embattled wall which ran round
the house, enclosing a good portion of ground.
To the south, and east, and west it has been de-
stroyed ; but to the north it still stands, overgrown
with lichens and bushes flowering from its cracks
— a remnant of the ancient state of warfare and
defence. Pear trees, and figs,, and hollyhocks, en-
tangled with creeping nasturtiums, and sweet
peas, and clematis, make its southern aspect gay
and green, while, over all, the frowning battle-
ments stand grey and gloomy like the wrecks of
a past state of things. Nor is the house without

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME 191

its ghosts. There is a tradition that the wall
was built by Giant St. Loe, as he is called among
the rustics. While he was building it, there
came a neighbouring giant, who jeered at him
and said : " Is this your wall of protection ?
Lo ! I will leap over it." This he did, like
Remus ; but Giant St. Loe went on building, and
never cared for him at all. Well, this giant who
built the wall, still haunts the Court, and up and
down the turret staircase on winter nights goes
clanking with his iron heel and jingling spurs.
A sadder story is the tale of a young daughter of
the house who drowned herself for love in the
gully at the end of the lime avenue, and who still is
seen, a white form, sheeted and shrill-screaming,
in the Black Walk underneath the chestnut trees.
Round the old hall hang the portraits of many
generations — Elizabethan ruffs, Puritan Geneva
collars, Sir Peter Lely ladies with lambs, a whole
family attired like Roman warriors of the age of
Anne, Romneys and Beecheys and Northcotes of a
recent date. Every degree of stiffness, primness,
smirk, melancholy, vacancy, intensity, gravity,
levity, stern manliness, and maiden prettiness —
warriors, and citizens, and shepherdesses, and
admirals, and lords — look down upon us as we
dine.

August 1866.

192 NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME

IV

Spring has come suddenly, with cuckoos,
blackbirds, and thrushes. The chestnuts are
bursting into leaf and cones of snowy blossom ;
laburnums and lilacs in flower ; with a wonder-
ful wealth of cowslip, bluebell, speedwell, allium,
red lychnis, orchis, dog-violet, and starwort in
fields and hedges. Primroses, too, linger, though
faint ; and the wood anemones are still like tears
or dew among deep grasses. Thus spring and
summer kiss each other. The trees of every
kind display their earliest, tenderest foliage,
scarce-fledged. Orchards everywhere are snowy-
pink ; and overhead there is the purest sky, with
soft winds from the Channel. We strolled down
to the stream, where C. showed me a little
dell brimful of thick blue hyacinths. Then we
went through meadows, picking cowslips and
orchises, watching the distance over Mendip and
Chew-Magna — a picture of most perfect spring
and hallowing tranquillity.

The hyacinths in these deep sunken lanes,
mingling with cowslips and cuckoo-flowers, pre-
sent the very bloom and beauty of the year.
Yet they are less lovely in the hedges than when
they blend with the same cuckoo-flowers and
cowslips on the slopes of short green grass, with

NOTES OF A SOMERSETSHIRE HOME IQV,

blue distance in front and the golden foliage of
thorn and oak above. Such slopes rival any
Alpine meadow. This early spring is like the
first dawn of love, before fruition, when all is
still conjecture and anticipation, when a hand-
touch is more passionate than the nights of
satisfied desire that are to follow. Of all spring
flowers, the hyacinths attract me most. Their
beauty is pathetic : tall stem and melancholy
curve and fringed bells amethystine, the divine
burden of youthful curls. As they line the lanes
in twilight, a mist of blueness, they seem to
murmur music.

April 1870.

CULTURE: ITS MEANING AND
ITS USES

NOT many years ago, I happened to notice the
review of one of my books in some weekly
periodical. The writer sneered at me for travel-
ling round Europe with a portmanteau full of
culture on my back. This made me reflect.
What does the reviewer mean by culture ?
What is it I am supposed to stagger under like
a pedlar's pack ? And then, what do / mean by
culture ? How do / value the wares I carry on
my shoulders ? Reflection convinced me that
the reviewer and myself held different opinions
about what we both call culture.

It is probable that when people use this word,
nowadays, it signifies for them some knowledge
of history and literature, intelligence refined by
considerable reading, and a susceptibility to the
beauties of art and nature. But words which
have been overworked, or which have passed

196 CULTURE

into the jargon of cliques, are apt to acquire a
secondary and degraded meaning with the gen-
eral public. And this has been the case with
culture. All the good things it implies in
common parlance are understood to be alloyed
with pedantry, affectation, aesthetical priggish-
ness. It is believed that the cultured person,
like the dilettante of a previous century, will rave
about the Correggiosity of Correggio, the symbolic
depth of Botticelli, the preciousness of Ruskin's
insight into Tintoretto. Or, if he does not take
that line, he may be expected to possess a multi-
farious store of knowledge about all periods of
all the arts and literatures, and to be perpetually
parading this knowledge in and out of season.

The last sort of stuff is, probably, what my
reviewer accused me of hawking over Europe.
But this, I am certain, is not what I mean when
T talk of culture.

Judged by the etymology of the word, culture
is not a natural gift. It implies tillage of the
soil, artificial improvement of qualities supplied
by nature. It is clearly, then, something ac-
quired, as the lovelinesses of the garden rose are
developed from the briar, or the " savage-tasted
drupe " becomes " the suave plum " by cultiva-
tion. In the full width of its meaning, when
applied to human beings, culture is the raising
of faculties — physical, mental, emotional, and

CULTURE 197

moral — to their highest excellence by training.
In a/particular sense, and in order to distinguish
culture from education, it implies that this train-
ing has been consciously carried on by the
individual. Education educes or draws forth
faculties. Culture improves, refines, and enlarges
them, when they have been brought out. Finally,
although moral and physical qualities are sus-
ceptible of both education and culture, yet it is
commonly understood, when we use these terms,
that we are thinking of the intellectual faculties.
This is specially the case with culture. It
would be pedantry to extend its sphere to
morals and athletics ; we cannot talk of a cul-
tured gymnast or a cultured philanthropist, for
instance, when we are referring to a man who
has trained either his muscles or his benevolent
emotions to their highest excellence.

I will therefore define culture, for the purpose
of this discussion, as the raising of previously
educated intellectual faculties to their highest
potency by the conscious effort of their pos-
sessors.

In its most generalised significance, culture
may be identified with self-effectuation. The
individual attempts to arrive at his real self, to
perfect the rudiments supplied by Nature on the
line for which he is best qualified, and by so
doing to arrive at independence — what the Ger-

198 CULTURE

mans call Selbststandigkeit. Men of true culture,
as distinguished from that false thing which
usurps the name, may possess diverse intellectual
temperaments, and reach widely-separated points
of vantage. But they agree in this, that each
has acquired freedom from bondage to cliques
and schools, from the prejudices of the worser
and the fashions of the better vulgar. Goethe
points out in two famous lines that this self-
effectuation, which is the highest end of culture,
demands different environments according to the
different quality of the mental force to be de-
veloped :

Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,

Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.

" Talent forms itself in the silence of the study,
character in the stream of the great world."
But when formed, each mental force, whether it
belongs to the contemplative or to the active
order, each self, so cultivated, will possess the
privilege insisted on by the same poet of being
able "to live resolvedly in the Whole, the Good,
the Beautiful " : not in the warped, the falsified,
the egotistical ; not in the petty, the adulterated,
the partial ; not in the school, the clique, the
coterie ; but in the large sphere of universal and
enduring ideas.

It will be seen now that, when I speak of

CULTURE 199

culture, I mean something different from what is
commonly intended by the half-slang phrase. It
may be urged I am ascribing too lofty and in-
definite a function to culture, when I define it to
be the raising of intellectual faculties to their
highest potency by means of conscious training.
Still, the more we think about the derivation
and the history of the word, the more shall we
become convinced that this is its root meaning,
its most abstract and essential signification. It
is the duty of criticism always to aim at bringing
back abused or debased words, so far as this is
possible, to their logical and legitimate values.

But now comes the question, How is the man
with educated faculties to achieve culture ? In
the case of rare and specially gifted natures,
there is no need to ask this question. They
attain culture, and more than it can give, by an
act of instinct. They leap to their work im-
pulsively, discover it inevitably. Owen Meredith,
the late Lord Lytton, wrote no stronger line
than this, which I quote from memory :

Genius does what it must, but talent does what
it can.

In trying to solve the problem of culture, we
are bound to leave genius unreckoned. The
force implied in what we call genius is incalcu-
lable, uncontrollable. Genial natures are often

200 CULTURE

doomed to frosts and thwartings ; are sometimes
favoured by the grace of circumstance ; are never
fostered by prescribed rules and calculated issues.
Handel, with nothing but a purely professional
education, soared far higher into the ideal
regions of his art than Mendelssohn with all the
culture Germany could give him. Shakespeare,
a mere playwright and theatre-lessee, darted his
rays of dramatic insight far deeper and far wider
than Goethe, who was nursed upon the lore and
wisdom of all ages. Genius is the pioneer whom
talent follows ; and men of culture have been
mostly talents, though we can discover here and
there a genius among their ranks. In dealing
with culture, then, we have to regard the needs
of talent rather than the necessities of genius :
intellectual faculties of good quality, rather than
minds of an exceptional, unique distinction.

Culture is self-tillage, the ploughing and the
harrowing of self by use of what the ages have
transmitted to us from the work of gifted minds.
It is the appropriation of the heritage bequeathed
from previous generations to the needs and
cravings of the individual in his emancipation
from "that which binds us all, the common."
It is the method of self-exercise which enables a
man, by entering into communion with the
greatest intellects of past and present generations,
by assimilating the leading ideas of the World-

CULTURE 201

Spirit, to make himself, according to his personal
capacity, an efficient worker, if not a creator, in
the symphony for ever woven out of human
souls.

There are two principal methods for arriving
at the ends involved in culture. These may be
briefly described as Humanism and Science.
In a certain sense, we owe both to that mighty
intellectual movement of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries with which the term Renaissance
is commonly connected. The so-called Refor-
mation movement was a subordinate, though
politically important, stream of its main current.
The essential element in this great burst of
energy has been well defined in Michelet's
famous formula : the re-discovery of the world
and of man. It began with the revival of
learning, or the return of the mediaeval mind to
fountain-heads of knowledge and of life-experi-
ence gushing from long-neglected antique sources.
At first, as was natural, the study of mankind in
ancient languages and literatures and histories,
in Hebrew, Greek, and Roman records, arrested
curiosity. Humanism — the literary, philosophical,
historical, artistic side of culture — gave tone to
European thought for many generations. Still,
it was impossible to pursue these studies of the
past without raising comparison with the present.
The remoteness of the modern from the antique

202 CULTURE

mind led to critical analysis ; and out of criticism
emerged science. Science includes all branches
of exact co-ordinated knowledge. Criticism,
exerted first upon texts and theories, began to
be extended to facts. In course of time the
study of Nature evolved itself out ot the study of
ancient philosophies. The curiosity about the
external world, which had at first been poetical,
aesthetic, sensuous, assumed the gravity of anxious
speculation and of careful inquiry into actual
conditions of existence. Mathematics, in the
field of physics and astronomy, introduced novel
conceptions of the universe. Without tracing
the evolution of the natural sciences, it is enough
to observe that at the end of the last century
Europe became aware that humanism alone would
not suffice as the basis of education and culture.
The Renaissance had rediscovered man and the
world. The criticism of man implied humanism.
The criticism of the world, at a somewhat later
period, led to science. Science, though tardy to
emerge, proved itself the paramount force of the
modern as distinguished from the antique and
the mediaeval spirit. The whole of this nine-
teenth century has been dominated by a rapid
extension of scientific ideas. Scientific methods
have been introduced into every department of
study. We have arrived at the conviction that
mental training of a thorough sort cannot neglect

CULTURE 203

science. In other words, we know now that an
interpenetration of humanism with science and of
science with humanism is the condition of the
highest culture. At present the fusion cannot
be said to have been full}' realised. And for the
future it is probable that there will always be
two differently constituted orders of minds, the
one inclining to the purely humanistic, and the
other to the purely scientific side of culture.

I have no wish to enter here into the contro-
versy which has been carried on between scien-
tific men and humanists as to the relative educa-
tional value of their methods. Nor do I want to
touch upon the burning question as to whether
the classics will have to be abandoned in our
schools. I shall content myself by pointing out
that if, as Pope says, "the proper study of
mankind is man," then humanism must always
keep the first rank in the higher intellectual
culture. It cannot be dethroned by abstract
mathematics or by the investigation of the
physical universe. Ideal culture involves both
factors ; and this ideal was to some extent
realised in Goethe. Few men — none, indeed —
can hope now to exercise themselves completely
in both branches. We have to choose between
the alternatives of a literary or a scientific training.
Still, the points of contact between humanism
and science are so numerous that thorough study

204 CULTURE

compels us to approach literature scientifically
and also to pursue science in a humane spirit.
The humanist remembers that his department is
capable of being treated with something like the
exactitude which physical research demands.
The man of science bears in mind that he can-
not afford to despise imagination and philosophy.
Both poetry and metaphysic, upon the one hand,
contributed to the formation of the evolutionary
hypothesis. Without habits of strict investiga-
tion, on the other hand, we should not possess
the great historical works of the nineteenth
century, its discoveries in comparative philology,
its ethnological theories and inquiries into primi-
tive conditions of society.

I have been speaking about culture as a form
of self-effectuation through conscious training of
the mind. It is a psychical state, so to speak,
which may be acquired by sympathetic and
assimilative study. It makes a man to be some-
thing ; it does not teach him to create anything.
It has no power to stand in the place of Nature,
and to endow a human being with new faculties.
It prepares him to exert his innate faculties in a
chosen line of work, with a certain spirit of
freedom, with a certain breadth of under-
standing.

This brings me to consider the relation of
culture to those special industries, arts, and

CULTURE 205

professions which are determined by the sub-
division of labour and by the varieties of human
temperament. We have seen already that "genius
does what it must." Education and self-training
exercise but slender formative influence over
natures like Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Shake-
speare. This is the pith of the old proverb that
" a poet is born, not made." Some of the
greatest men of genius, Burns and Turner for
example, can hardly be called men of culture.
Others, like Ben Jonson, Tasso, Heine, were so
emphatically. We have also seen that "Talent
does what it can." For this reason, culture is
most important to men of talent. It enables
them to know what they can do ; brings forth
their latent capacities; leads them to choose
painting or sculpture, pure literature or philo-
sophy, according to their innate bias. It also
compensates that bias by giving them a general
sympathy with things outside their speciality.
In this respect it is of value also for men of
genius, whose bias in one particular direction
reaches the maximum. Specialists, unless they
be creative geniuses of the most marked type,
require to be armed by culture against narrow-
mindedness and the conceit of thinking that their
own concerns are all-important. A man of
moderate ability who cannot see beyond the
world of beetles, beyond the painter's studio,

206 CULTURE

beyond the church or chapel, beyond the concert
room, beyond the grammar of an extinct language,
or some one penod of history, is apt to be intol-
erable. Culture teaches him his modest place
in the whole scheme. Culture is, therefore,
absolutely essential to the mental well-being of
persons confined by their craft or profession to
a narrow range of intellectual interests. I am,
of course, not alluding here to handicraftsmen
and honest labourers, who do the work required
of them without self-conceit, and serve the
immediate needs of society without being aware
of their own inestimable value. But, to return
to the intellectual specialist. It is fortunate for
him that the downright examination of any
branch of knowledge, the conscientious practice
of any fine art, directs a man of ordinary talent
on the path of real culture. This is due to the
inter-connection of all departments in the scheme
of modern thought. Humanists and scientists
have been engaged together for nearly five
centuries in weaving a magic robe, warp and
woof combined into one fabric, which gradually
through their accumulated industry, approximates
to something like an organic tissue. The hope
of the future is that any exact investigation of
one part will imply an adequate acquaintance
with the whole. An able man, therefore, who
has made himself an accomplished specialist, will

CULTURE 207

even now be found to have in him the spirit of
true culture. That is to say, he will regard his
own subject as one province of a vast, pehaps
an illimitable, empire.

In a certain sense all people who have de-
veloped their own nature to the utmost are
specialists. We give the name, indeed, to
botanists and oculists, palaeographers and lepi-
dopterists, because these men devote their facul-
ties to very strongly demarcated fields of study.
But, if we regard the problem from the point of
view of personality, the specialist is one who
applies the whole of his energies to the single
task for which he is specifically qualified. I mean
it is no less a speciality in philosophers like
Hegel, Comte, and Herbert Spencer, to attempt
the co-ordination of all human knowledge in one
system, than it is a speciality in men like Ehren-
berg and Edison to concentrate their attention
upon infusoria and electricity. Both types of
individuals, those who strive to embrace the
whole, and those who delve into a portion, stand
in the same need of culture. I am speaking of
culture now under its moral aspect, as teaching
us to measure any man's littleness against the
vastness of the whole. Auguste Comte, to take
an example of one sort, was deficient in the
spirit of real culture, because he thought he
could reconstitute religion on a fanciful basis.

208 CULTURE

Darwin was not deficient in this spirit of real
culture, because he published his epoch-making
theory as a simple hypothesis, restraining himself
to rigorous inductions and to limited deductions
within a certain sphere of knowledge. No one
was more aware than Darwin that he had made
a serious contribution to his own branch of
science. But no one was more conscious of the
immense dark sphere of inscrutabilities sur-
rounding the little spark of light he had evoked.
I must repeat that culture is not an end in
itself. It prepares a man for life, for work, for
action, for the reception and emission of ideas.
Life itself is larger than literature, than art, than
science. Life does not exist for them, but they
for life. This does not imply that it is better to
be a man of no culture than a man of culture.
The man of culture is obviously capable of living
to more purpose, of getting a larger amount out
of life, than the man of no culture. He can also
judge more fairly in all cases of comparative
criticism. Still, I am unable to perceive that
the refinements of the intellect on any line of its
development involve an ennobling or a strength-
ening of the human being. Given individuals of
equal calibre, as many wise men may be found
among the artisans and peasants as among
reputed savants. Household proverbs are not
unfrequently a safer guide to conduct than the

CULTURE 209

aphorisms of professors. We all of us probably
have known flawless characters, men, as the
Greeks said, "four-cornered without defect," who
never enjoyed the privileges of education. The
life of no great nation lies either in humanism
or science. The arts and literature of Italy in
the sixteenth century did not make her powerful
or virtuous. The so-called progress to which
she is now sacrificing the monuments of her past,
a progress dominated by scientific notions, has
substituted ugliness and vulgarity for beauty and
distinction, without adding an iota to her strength
or general intelligence. We ought not to despise
culture. The object of this article is to demon-
strate its value. But the nearer a man has come
to possessing it, the less will he over-estimate
acquirements or accumulations of knowledge,
the more importance will he attach to character,
to personality, to energy, to independence.

At this point it may be useful to glance at the
polemic which Walt Whitman, the prophet-poet
of democracy, used to carry on against culture.
His arguments, to a large extent, miss their
mark, because they are directed against the
vulgar conception of culture, as an imitative
smattering, a self-assertiveness of so-called
cultivated people. He has ignored the higher
significance which may be given to the word,
and which I have sought to bring forth. Yet

o

210 CULTURE

much that he said is worthy of attention. He
endeavoured to enforce the truth that a great and
puissant nation does not live by sensibility and
knowledge, but by the formation of character, by
the development of personal energy. " What is
our boasted culture ? " he asks. " Do you term
that perpetual, pistareen, paste-pot work Ameri-
can art, American drama, taste, &c. ? " Culture
is good in its way ; but it is not what forms a
manly personality, a sound and simple faith.
" As now taught, accepted, and carried out, are
not the processes of culture rapidly creating a
class of supercilious infidels, who believe in
nothing ? " " Shall a man lose himself in count-
less masses of adjustments, and be so shaped
with reference to this, that, and the other that
the simply good and healthy and brave parts of
him are reduced and chipped away, like the
bordering of box in a garden ? " The only
culture which is of service to a nation must aim
less at polish than at the bracing of character.
"It must have for its spinal meaning the forma-
tion of typical personality of character, eligible to
the uses of the high average of men, and not
restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses."
To the man of letters he exclaims : —

What is this you bring ?
Is it not something that has been better told
done before?

CULTURE 211

Have you not imported this, or the spirit of it,

in some ship ?
Is it not a mere tale ? « rhyme ? a prettiness ?

And again :

Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distilled

from poems pass away ;
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and

leave ashes;
Admirers, importers, obedient persons, make but

the soil of literature.

The pith of his contention lies in the following
admonition, which breathes the spirit of an
antique Spartan or Roman : " Fear grace,
elegance, civilisation, delicatesse." Shun the
atmosphere which enfeebles, the learning which
encumbers, the customs and traditions which
trammel independence. Prophetic utterances of
this sort are apt to be exaggerated. It is good,
however, that cultured people should be told not
to let culture draft them into cliques and coteries,
separate them from the people, blunt them to
the main thought-currents and vital interests of
their age.

No great and spontaneous growths of art have
arisen in an age of erudition and assimilation.
The Greek drama, the Gothic style of archi-
tecture, the romantic drama of Elizabethan
England, were products not of cultivated taste,

212 CULTURE

but of instinctive genius. There is profound
truth in what Herder taught to the young
Goethe, that really great poetry has always been
the product of a national spirit, and not the
product of studies confined to a select few.

No one feels this more than one who, like
myself, has devoted a large portion of his life to
the history of that period which developed
modern culture. I mean the Italian Renaissance.
Humanism inflicted an irreparable damage on
the national literature of Italy. It impeded the
evolution of the mother-tongue by the preference
given to composition in dead languages. It
caused an abrupt division between the learned
classes and the people. When men of genius
began again to use Italian for great works of art,
they found themselves hampered in two ways.
They were clogged with classical reminiscences
and precedents. They were separated from
popular sympathy and deprived of popular
support. The masterpieces of their predecessors,
Petrarch and Boccacio, had become classics,
and were slavishly imitated. It was not in the
lyric or the drama, but in the plastic arts, that
the national genius of the Italians expressed
itself during the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-
turies.

Germany presents a parallel instance. It is
in music that the modern Germans have displayed

CULTURE 213

their national originality. Yet the Germans
have been the most thoroughly cultivated of the
European nations during the last century and a
half. That is to say, they have worked at both
branches of culture, humanism and science, with
the greatest diligence, and have applied both to
literary studies with the most philosophical
breadth of intelligence. It cannot be said, how-
ever, that the creative literature of this cultured
race, in poetry, oratory, the drama, and the
novel, taken as a whole, has been of the highest
order. It is true that their representative man
of genius, the Olympian Goethe, was essentially
a poet of culture ; and he shows to what
altitudes the cultivated intellect may climb,
when it resides in a noble and exceptionally-
gifted personality. Goethe towers so markedly
superior to all the other poets of culture upon
German soil, that his example tests the rule.

Some of these sayings may sound hard in an
age and country where culture appears to have
superseded originality. They seem especially
intended to discourage those of us who are
doomed by the limitations of our nature to be
critics, men of learning, taste, assimilation. We
must comfort ourselves by reflecting that it is
impossible to transcend the conditions of the
times we live in, or the limits of our personality.

Society would reach something like perfection.

214 CULTURE

if each individual succeeded in self-effectuation,
fulfilling the law of his own nature, and being
distinguished from his neighbours by some
marked quality, some special accomplishment.
The concord of divers instruments constitutes
the music of a symphony. The blending of
distinct personalities creates the finest mental
and moral harmony. To some extent, of course,
this result is attained wherever human beings
are associated. But we suffer too much from
the tyranny of majorities, the oppression of
custom, the gregarious instinct of commonplace
and timid persons. As I have already tried to
demonstrate, true culture tends to the differentia-
tion of individualities, by enabling people to
find out what they are made for, what they can
do best, what their deepest self requires for
its accomplishment. True culture is never in a
condescending attitude. It knows that no kind
of work, however trivial, ought to be regarded
with contempt. People who carve cherry-stones,
dance ballets, turn rondeaux, are as much needed
as those who till the soil, construct Cabinets, or
fabricate new theories of the universe. True
culture respects hand-labour upon equal terms
with brain-labour, the mechanic with the inventor
of machinery, the critic of poetry with the singer
of poems, the actor with the playwright. The
world wants all sorts, and wants each sort to be

CULTURE 215

of the best quality. True culture knows that the
quality cannot be first-rate when the species is
looked down upon. On the other hand, false
culture, the kind against which Walt Whitman
prophesies, encourages the growth of prigs who
despise folk because they do not pursue some
branch of industry which is conventionally re-
garded as being higher in the scale than others.
It makes Pharisees, who feel themselves superior
to their neighbours, because these people do not
belong to their own set, their own coterie, their
own creed, and so forth.

The liberality and width of toleration upon
which I am insisting as signs of true culture do
not imply a facile acquiescence in every doctrine
or in every mode of living. True culture does
not prevent a man from being pugnacious, ready
to fight for his opinions, eager to conquer in
what he regards as the right cause. In the
universal symphony strife is no less important
than concord. Fully developed personalities
cannot co-exist and energise together without
clash and conflict. Innovation works with con-
servatism, powers of revolution and of progress
combine with stationary or retrogressive forces,
to keep the organism in a state of active energy.
As Empedocles put it, both Love and Hate are
necessary to the balance of the cosmic sphere.
Culture prepares us to acquiesce in this state of

216 CULTURE

things as part of the universal order. While re-
cognising our own right and duty to struggle for
the truth as we perceive it, we acknowledge the
same right and the same duty in our opponents.
For some reason hidden from our mortal ken the
world was meant to be so governed. Pheno-
menal existence is in a perpetual state of
becoming ; becoming implies cohesion and dis-
solution ; both processes involve contention. All
the soldiers in all the armies, if they act with
energy, sincerity, disinterested loyalty, serve one
Lord and Master.

There is, therefore, no reason to fear that the
higher culture should involve men in supercilious
indifference, or cynical acceptance, or the Buddh-
istic inertia of contemplation.

SOME NOTES ON FLETCHER'S
" VALENTINIAN"

1 THINK it was Mr. Swinburne who said that
Beaumont and Fletcher invented the Heroic
Romance. This is an acute remark, the right
understanding of which will enable us to place
these dramatists in their proper relation to the
best art of the Elizabethan age. There seems to
be no reason, in the case of their most interest-
ing serious plays, why the climax should not be
quite other than it is. We cannot conceive of
Hamlet being brought to a fortunate conclu-
sion for all parties, or of a tragic catastrophe
being found for The Tempest. But if The
Maid's Tragedy had ended happily, while
Philaster or A King and No King had
taken a disastrous turning in the last scenes, little
violence would have been done to our sense of
artistic propriety. The reason of this is that the
conduct of the drama in each case is not properly

2i8 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN "

tragic or properly comic, but romantic. In other
words, these authors did not write plays for the
sake of a well-wrought plot, or with a clear
sense of the inevitable in human circumstance,
or with the view of interpreting character, but for
the development of an attractive tale. The tale
itself is often in a true sense heroic ; and
though Philaster and A King and No King
have happy endings, while The Maid's Tragedy
ends unhappily, all three plays belong precisely
to one and the same species — the species of
heroic fable dramatically set forth by dialogue in
acts and scenes.

Beaumont and Fletcher — if we may still be
allowed to use these names for the work of many
hands which bears their superscription — were
not dramatists so much as great dramatic rheto-
ricians. There is dramatic rhetoric, as there is
poetical rhetoric. The latter differs from true
poetry in this, that it diffuses where it should
condense, that it approaches the object from out-
side by description instead of penetrating to its
core ; and also that it is not inevitable, not abso-
lutely sincere. Dramatic rhetoric has the same
leading qualities. The dramatic rhetorician rarely
knows how to be succinct, how to let his per-
sonages reveal themselves by actions and uncon-
scious utterances, how to evolve his plot without
explaining it by declamation put into their

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN" 219

mouths. Furthermore, he is careless of consist-
ency and truth to nature in the drawing of his
characters, incapable of making us feel certain
that so, and so only, could they have spoken,
acted, looked, and moved.

Both these kinds of rhetoric, the poetical and
the dramatic, form the strength of Beaumont and
Fletcher. When we have once yielded ourselves
up to the control of what is confessedly less
potent than the truest dramatic inspiration and
the highest poetry, we shall acknowledge that
their rhetoric possesses a real charm. And what
is more, it suits their choice of the romantic
rather than the strictly tragic or comic method.
While reading them, we experience the pleasure
that attends impassioned improvisation, the plea-
sure that Bandello's audience perhaps enjoyed in
listening to his pathetic and extravagant novelle.
Thought, feeling, sentiment, language, metre ;
all the elements of their art are fluid, copious,
untrammelled, poured forth from a richly abun-
dant vein. But the dramatic tension is compara-
tively slack, and the poetic touch comparatively
tame.

No other playwrights of the epoch possessed
this power of rhetoric so fully. It is the distinc-
tion of Shakespeare that, both as a poet and a
dramatist, he was free from its defects and did
not need its qualities ; and this in a lesser degree

220 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN"

may be said of Webster also. Ben Jonson, in
his strength and his weakness, is so far removed
from Beaumont and Fletcher that we can hardly
compare them. He has not the same power to
fascinate ; but he has far more power to impress
and subjugate our mind. He takes hold of us
by means of a quite different faculty, the faculty
of intellectual vigour, intense cerebration, mascu-
line grasp, artistic purpose firmly conceived and
conscientiously pursued. It would be rather
with Massinger, Shirley, Ford, that Beaumont
and Fletcher should be matched as rhetoricians
of the drama ; and I think that by fulness, rich-
ness, and variety of this particular gift, the twin
playwrights would easily bear off the prize.

One of the marked points about Beaumont
and Fletcher's manner, in connection with their
rhetoric, is that they worked like Rossini and
the later masters of the Italian opera. I mean,
they wrote out, at full, all the florid fioriture
which the age required for dramatic effect, and
left no iota of it to the actor's personality and
gesture. They put into the actor's lips every
nuance of the situation, so that he had nothing
to do but to recite volubly what they had
copiously versified. As is the case with Rossini's
melodies, so with their rhetorical motives,
there is not quite the pith and substance to lender
this method enduringly attractive. Shakespeare

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN " 221

makes us feel men and women, talking, acting ;
Beaumont and Fletcher make us feel them being
talked for, provided with fluent utterance to
describe their action. What partially blinded
contemporaries and critics like Dryden to Shake-
speare's supremacy, was that he was contented
to adopt the Romantic style as it had been created
by his predecessors; and his immediate successors
were as yet incapable of discerning the whole
difference between his use of it and Beaumont's
or Fletcher's. They could perceive Jonson's
superiority more easily because his elaborate per-
formances were in a sharply contrasted style.

What I have termed dramatic rhetoric, as
opposed to genuine dramatic poetry, betrayed
Beaumont and Fletcher into their most serious
faults as playwrights. Its want of absolute sin-
cerity led them to violate truth, propriety, and
probability, both in their fables and their charac-
ters. Sudden and unaccountable conversions to
good from evil, and vice versa, like Hippolyta's in
The Custom of the Country, or Boroski's in The
Loyal Subject ; inexplicable reconcilements at the
ends of plays, the most infamous people being
taken into favour and pardoned, like Frederick in
A Wife for a Month ; mere tricks to deceive the
audience and prepare a surprise, like Polydore's
feigned death in The Mad Lover; all these
devices to protract a plot or to wind up a story,

222 FLETCHERS " VALENTINIAN"

to amuse or to astonish, at the expense of ethical
and artistic fitness, belong to rhetoric, which is
unconscientious in the use of means, and in-
different to the necessity of preparing effects by
proper and natural gradations. To the same
cause may be ascribed their almost invariable
habit of overdoing moral situations. They make
brave generals, like Memnon in The Mad Lover,
proclaim their own valour in language which
would be exaggerated on the lips of a panegyrist.
Their virtuous women vaunt their chastity in
language which suggests familiarity with the
brothel. Thus, too, they cannot refrain from
" volleys of execrations and defiances," cannon-
ades of protestations. What French critics call
emphase is for ever spoiling the effect of their
most passionate scenes. It seems that they
were compelled to surcharge each motive by in-
ability to exhibit the motive clearly and precisely.
They resemble those imperfect writers who ex-
pand a paragraph because they have not force,
concision, mental pithiness enough to say their
say in a sentence.

A more legitimate field for the display of
dramatic rhetoric, and one to which they were
extremely partial, is casuistry. Upon honour,
chastity, loyalty, marriage, upon the right and
wrong of duelling, upon the advantages and dis-
advantages of travel, and so forth ad infinitum.

FLETCHER'S "VALENTINIAN" 223

their discussions are luminous and eminently
interesting. They succeed in debating dramati-
cally without falling into the forensic tone which
spoils this kind of casuistry in Euripides. Their
characters, however they may spit fire and belch
forth fury, seldom condescend to nagging.

Their true strength was shown in planning
some elaborate situation, like the finale of an
opera act, carefully prepared, long drawn-out,
introducing the main agents of the drama.
These situations are always set forth with
admirable but prolix oratory. Into the full
effect of such dramatic climaxes, we, who only
read them, can but dimly see. They must have
intoxicated an audience whose eyes were satiated
with the groupings of practised actors, and
whose ears were delighted with the declamation
of honeyed eloquence. That audience hardly
perceived the thinness of the stream of poetry,
the oftentimes miserable absurdity of the plot, or
the occasional impropriety of the part assigned to
a chief character. The sustained psychological
coherence and the perfection of single scenes, in
which Shakespeare had no rival, were hardly
missed by them. They were fascinated by the
linked sweetness of Beaumont's verbal music, by
the glitter of his rapidly changing lights and
shadows of emotion. Furthermore, they were
warmed with passion, and the passion, though

224 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN"

diluted, was vehement and various. They were
interested in casuistical questions and scruples of
honour, analogous to those which their own lives
yielded. They were touched and melted by senti-
ment and romance, beyond the scope perhaps
of their experience, but yet upon the plane of
their habitual attitude toward life.

All these considerations taken together go far
to explain why the attractive and many-coloured,
but essentially inferior dramatic work of Beau-
mont and Fletcher took so strong a hold upon
the imagination of the age as almost to eclipse
the fame of Shakespeare. Not only in regard to
casuistry, but also in many other points, it might
be compared with that of the great Greek
dramatic rhetorician Euripides ; and we know
that Euripides, though the least excellent, was
for centuries the most popular of the three Attic
tragedians.

The tragedy which I have selected to illus-
trate these general remarks is one that may with
safety be attributed to the sole hand of Fletcher,
and which ranks among the finest of his com-
positions. Founded upon actual events in the
life of Valentinian III., it presents the facts of
history in a romantic spirit, partly in order to
increase the interest of the fable, and partly to
secure unity for what would otherwise have been
a disjointed plot. The principal actors in the

FLETCHER'S " VA LENTINIA N * 225

drama are Valentin fan and his wife Eudoxia, the
Roman general Ae"cius, Maximus and his wife
Lucina, together with a crowd of servile crea-
tures, male and female, used by the Emperor in
his pleasures and addicted basely to his service.
For the furtherance of the action, Fletcher has
introduced some Roman soldiers, of no historical
importance ; detailed allusion to whom is not
here necessary.

The first act, as is common with the more
skilful craftsmen of the great English period,
blocks out the plot with masterly precision. In
the first scene a dialogue between Valentinian's
four base Ministers lays bare the character of
the Emperor, and unfolds the plot which he has
laid for Lucina. The second scene introduces
Lucina herself, and shows with what constancy
she resists the flatteries and blandishments of
the court ladies sent to corrupt her mind.
Only, in depicting this Roman ideal of matronal
chastity, Fletcher, with his wonted coarseness of
taste, has touched on very slippery ground.
Balbus, it is true, reports that when he hinted in
her ears how easily the Emperor might play the
part of Tarquin to her :

She fainted to a Lucrece that hung by,
And with an angry look, that from her eyes
Shot vestal fire against me, she departed.

P

226 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN*

This is fine. But upon Lucina's own lips the
dramatist ought never to have put such words of
double meaning as the following, addressed to
Phorba and Ardelia —

/ perceive ye :

Your own dark sins dwell with ye ! and that price
You sell the chastity of modest wives at,
Run to diseases with your bones !

In the third scene we learn the characters of
Maximus and Ae"cius, and their several disposi-
tions toward the Emperor sunk in his vices.
Maximus is hot with indignation, excusing the
disaffection of the nation and the mutinous spirit
of the army by Valentinian's own intolerable
conduct. Aficius, who suffers no less deeply on
account of the degradation of the empire, pre-
serves his loyalty intact. The high-flown con-
ception of kinghood which marks the Jacobean
drama finds noble expression in this speech : —

Yet remember,

We are bu subjects, Maximus; obedience
To what ii done, and grief for what is ill done,
Is all we can call ours. The hearts of princes
Are like the temples of the gods; pure incense,
Until unhallowed hands defile those offerings,
Burns ever there ; we must not put 'em out,
Because the priests that touch those sweets are
wicked ;

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN'' 22?

We dare not, dearest friend, nay, more, we can-
not,—

Whilst we consider who we are, and how,
To what laws bound, much more to what law-
giver ;

Whilst majesty is made to be obeyed,
And not inquired into; whilst gods and angels
Make but a rule as we do, though a stricter, —
Like desperate and unseasoned fools, let fly
Our killing angers, and forsake our honours.

Valentinian himself is next brought in view,
hearing from the lips of Aecius what the soldiers
say against him, the peril of his throne, and the
unworthy part which he is playing on the
world's stage. There is no want of candour
now in the old general, who had lately spoken
with such submissive reverence of the divinity
that doth hedge a king. Fletcher draws this
Emperor as rather weak than utterly bad ; he is
a lawless young man with the making of a
tyrant in him.

The first act having thus presented the chief
characters and outlined the plot, the second act
brings on the business of the play. Valentinian
gains at dice the ring of Maximus, by means of
which he intends to bring Lucina to the palace,
and there to effect forcibly what the arts of his
sycophants have failed to compass. The second
and third scenes are employed in throwing

228 FLETCHER'S " VA LENTINIA N "

further light upon Lucina, who goes unwillingly
to court at the exhibition of her husband's ring,
and in developing the situation between Valen-
tinian, his generals, and the half-rebellious army.
Scenes 4, 5, and 6 of act ii. and scene I of
act iii. are closely linked together in one rhythm
of imaginative presentation ; all the emotions of
thrilling expectation, pathos, tragic passion, and
profound pity being successively called forth, and
verbally expressed with the dramatic rhetoric which
I have qualified as the chief note of Fletcher's art.
It is a very masterly example of his power to
sustain a carefully prepared situation, and to
prolong its interest by the gradual heightening
of romantic incident. In the first of these
connected scenes Lucina enters the great hall of
the palace, attended by her two waiting women,
and received by Chilax. In the next she passes
to an inner apartment, still more sumptuous,
where two of Fletcher's sweetest lyrics, sung to
music, greet her ears. Lovely as are these songs
in themselves, they possess a peculiar and almost
plaintive beauty in their dramatic context ; for
never surely was the seductiveness of wanton
pleasure more airily and delicately insinuated :

Now the lusty spring is seen;

Golden yellow, gaudy blue,

Daintily invite the view.
Everywhere on every green,

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN" 229

Roses blushing as they blow,
And enticing men to pull;
Lilies whiter than the snow,
Woodbines of sweet honey full :
All love's emblems, and all cry,
" Ladies, if not plucked, we die."

Then again :

Hear, ye ladies that despise

What the mighty Love hath done;
Fear examples, and be wise ;

Fair Calisto was a nun;
Leda, sailing on the stream

To deceive the hopes of man,
Love accounting but a dream,

Doted on a silver swan;
Danae, in a brazen tower,
Where no love was, loved a shower.

But Lucina, when she is asked how she likes
the song, only replies :

I like the air well;

But for the words, they are lascivious,

And over-light for ladies.

Then Balbus displays a heap of jewels, thrown
about in rich profusion, for her acceptance. She
passes them by, and going forward, is met by
Valentinian's ladies strewing rushes in her
honour : —

Where is this stranger? Rushes, ladies, rushes!
Rushes as green as summer for this stranger!

230 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN"

At this point the men retire, her waiting-
women are withdrawn, and Lucina has perforce
to accept the proffered hospitality of the court
dames. They take her onward into a third
chamber, where the door closes on her ; and
when again it opens, Valentinian appears to the
sound of soft music, leading her by the hand,
and advancing up the stage, alone with her at
last. Now she knows, what she had always
feared, that the ring of Maximus has been used
as a lure to bring her to her ruin. She pleads
for her honour, appealing to the sacredness of
Caesar, to her husband's services, kneeling upon
the ground to crave for pity :

You are Ccesar,

Which is, "the father of the empire's honour";
You are too near the nature of the gods
To wrong the weakest of all creatures, women.

But prayers are vain, and when this act closes
we know that poor Lucina's doom will be accom-
plished.

There are few instances of dramatic rhetoric
finer than the succession of these three scenes,
ascending to a tragic climax through so many
stages of preparation. It may, however, be
questioned whether the full effect was realised on
the London stage in the first years of the seven-
teenth century, for there everything was left to

FLETCHER'S lt VALENTIN I AN" 231

the imagination ; and though the purest dramatic
poetry gains rather than it loses by simplicity
of presentation, what I have called dramatic
rhetoric is specially adapted to magnificence of
wise en scene. In one of our great modern
theatres, the Scala at Milan, for example, a
proper spectacular gradation might be obtained
by means of drop-scenes raised successively,
until, in the last scene, the whole stage lay open
to its depth, and Valentinian, entering with
Lucina from the bottom, should advance to the
footlights for their dialogue. This device, and
this alone it seems to me, could visibly convey
the impression of Lucina's passage from room to
room through the sinful splendours of the palace,
surrounded by meretricious enticements to the
ear and eye, beleaguered by the false blandish-
ments of men and women bent on her destruction,
until at last she is left alone with her all-powerful
betrayer — an impression which, in reading the
play, is almost overpowering.

The interval between acts ii. and iii. suffices
for the deed of darkness done in some secluded
chamber. When the curtain rises again, we
learn from the lips of Proculus and Chilax that
all is over, and are prepared for Valentinian's
re-entrance with Lucina. Her tone of pleading
is now changed to one of grave rebuke and fiery
accusation. Fortunately for Fletcher's fame, in

232 FLETCHER'S " VA LENT IN I A N »

this difficult passage he has just avoided Ms usual
temptation to make a heroine scold or utter things
beneath her dignity. He came very near so
doing, however, as will be seen from the follow-
ing quotations. Lucina's first words are —

As long as there is motion in my body,

And life to give me words, I'll cry for justice !

In answer to this speech Fletcher found for
Valentinian the strongest line in the whole play,
a line which, for dramatic intensity, might be
classed with some of those keen, pungent single
lines in Webster and Tourneur :

Justice shall never hear you; I am justice.
Then she breaks out :

Wilt thou not kill me, monster, ravisher?
Thou bitter bane o' th' empire,; look upon me,
And if thy guilty eyes dare see these ruins
Thy wild lust hath laid level with dishonour,
The sacrilegious razing of this temple,
The mother of thy black sins would have blushed at,
Behold, and curse thyself! The gods will find thee
(That's all my refuge now,) for they are righteous.
Vengeance and horror circle thee! The empire,
In which thou liv'st a strong continued surfeit,
Like poison will disgorge thee ; good men raze thee
For ever being read again but vicious;
Women and fearful maids make vows against thee ;
Thy own slaves, if they hear of this, shall hate thee ;

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN" 233

And those thou hast corrupted, first fall from thee;
And, if thou U?st me live, the soldier,
Tired with thy tyrannies, break through obedience
And shake his strong steel at thee!

The accent of rhodomontade and railing, the
emphase of which I spoke, is felt here ; but,
notwithstanding this, Lucina's abuse compares
favourably with that of Bonduca, Edith in Rollo,
and Evadne in The Maid's Tragedy. It was not
likely that Valentinian should be moved by that ;
he makes, on the contrary, cynical avowals of
his satisfaction and ample promises for the future,
sustaining his imperial dignity with sentences
like these :

Know I am far above the faults I do,
A nd those I do, I am able to forgive too.

Then, finding her still " cold as crystal," he
leaves the wronged woman face-downward on a
couch, where she is discovered by her husband
and Ae"cius, who have meanwhile come to court.
The thread of dramatic interest, already spun
to such a length, is now prolonged upon a
finer and more thrilling chord of tension. The
two generals extract from Lucina, by signs
and mute avowals rather than by spoken words,
what has happened, and learn that she is resolved
to die like Lucrece. Maximus says little to
break this resolution ; and with tender farewells

234 FLETCHER'S " VA LENT IN I A N "

to the wretched lady, dignified in her humiliation,
they send her home to perish. One of the most
touching of those melodious passages, which
Coleridge called Fletcher's "lyrical interbreath-
ings," occurs here in a speech by Maximus :

Go, Lucina;

Already in thy tears I have read thy wrong,
A Iready found a Cczsar : go, thou lily,
Thou sweetly -drooping flower ! Go, silver swan,
A nd sing thine own sad requiem ! Go, Lucina,
And, if thou darest, outlive this wrong.

Aecius now remains with his friend, striving to
temper a mood that verges upon madness ; and
while they are thus occupied, Lucina's waiting-
woman enters with the news that she has died of
grief.

When first she entered
Into her house, after a world of weeping,
And blushing like the sunset, as we saw hey:
"Dare /," said she, "defile this house with whore,
In which his noble family has flourished?"
A t which she fell, and stirred no more

That is only just passable. For Fletcher's sake
let us refrain from suggesting any comparison
with Giovanni's words on his mother's death in
Vittoria Corombona. Yet it must be admitted
that he has shown more reserve than is usual
with him throughout the scene. Few words are

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN" 235

wasted either by Aecius or Maximus upon a fact
which needs no amplification to enforce its
pathos.

Lucina's death cuts the tragedy of Valentinian
in half. The second part exhibits Fletcher's
weakness as a dramatic poet. He has only
arrived at the commencement of the third act,
and he is bound, according to his own conception
of the playwright's art, to carry the story forward
without allowing the interest of the audience to
cool. But he has already exhausted his finest
vein of romantic poetry, and has displayed his
force as a rhetorical dramatist in its fullest vigour
through the long-drawn scena of Lucina's betrayal
and heartbroken death. In continuation of the
previous motive, it is true that he will have to
bring poetical justice down upon the Emperor ;
but this is insufficient for a five-act tragedy.
Therefore he begins to develop a new series of
exciting incidents out of the character of Maximus.
Hitherto we have known Maximus only as a bluff
soldier, less tolerant than his wise and world-
worn friend Aecius towards the vices of Valen-
tinian. He must now be employed, first through
the natural passion of revenge, and afterwards
through the superadded passion of a vulgar
ambition, to supply a secondary motive for the
plot, which otherwise would languish. It is the
doom of Fletcher as a dramatic rhetorician, lacking

236 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN"

the genuine dramatic inspiration, that he cannot
convince us of the necessity of what ensues from
the evolution of these two passions in the pre-
viously uncoloured character of the protagonist
Maximus.

History supplied the playwright with the
following events. Valentinian III. murdered
the general Agcius with his own hand, then
outraged the wife of Petronius Maximus, and
finally was killed by the orders of Maximus,
who, after this assassination, assumed the
imperial purple, and compelled Valentinian's
widow, Eudoxia, to become his consort. Fletcher,
in order to give unity to his plot, inverted the
order of these incidents. He sought the main
tragic motive in the outrage upon Lucina and
the revenge of Maximus ; but wishing to com-
bine this with the murder of Aecius, he resorted
to the expedient of making Maximus the
treacherous instigator of that crime. Aecius,
represented as the bosom friend of Maximus,
stands in the way of his vengeance, for Maximus
well knows that nothing will induce the loyal
general to sanction an attempt upon the Emperor's
person. He therefore flings love and honour to
the winds, and forges a letter which rouses
Valentinian's suspicions against his faithful
subject. Aecius, after scenes of protracted
Roman eloquence, falls on his own sword, and

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN" 237

when he is dead Maximus, playing a part
similar to that of Antony in Julius Ccesar, induces
Aretus and Phidias, the great general's lieuten-
ants, to revenge his death on Valentinian. They
succeed in administering poison to the Emperor,
having secured an honourable exit out of life for
themselves by suicide. Fletcher obviously put
forth all his strength to make the scene of
Valentinian's death in agony, taunted by Aretus,
terrific. But those who are curious to compare
dramatic rhetoric with true dramatic intensity
should read that scene side by side with
Brachiano's death-scene in Vittoria Corombona,
and with the last speeches of Shakespeare's
King John. Valentinian screams in his torment :

Oh, gods, gods ! Drink, drink ! Colder, colder
Than snow on Scythian mountains! Oh, my

heart'Stings !

Danubius I'll have brought thorough my body,
And Volga on whose face the north wind freezes.
I am an hundred hells ! an hundred piles
Already to my funeral are flaming!

Shall I not drink ? ,

By Heaven !

I'll let my breath out, that shall burn ye all,
If ye deny me longer ! Tempests blow me,
And inundations that have drunk up kingdoms,
Flow over me and quench me !

These frenzies, put together from successive

238 FLETCHER- S " VALENTIN1AN*

speeches, are striking. But they will not stand
beside King John's :

There is so hot a summer in my bosom
That all my bowels crumble up to dust;
I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment, and against this fire

Do I shrink up

Poisoned — ill fare ; — dead, forsook, cast off;

And none of you will bid the winter come,

To thrust his icy fingers in my maw ;

Nor let my kingdom's rivers take their course

Through my burn'd bosom; nor entreat the north

To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips,

And comfort me with cold.

After all these deaths, Maximus reflects upon
the general ruin he has wrought. His thirst for
vengeance has been satisfied, but at the expense
of his friend's betrayal and murder, and by the
sacrifice of two brave Romans more. It is
necessary to rehabilitate him in the opinion of
the audience ; and this Fletcher feebly attempts
to do by making him express a rhetorical desire
to join Lucina and Ae"cius in Elysium. That,
however, is but mere bravado ; and his next
thought is how to grasp the empire. He secures
the good-will of the army, and then prevails upon
Eudoxia to become his wife, pretending that he
has waded through treason, treachery, and
murder — nay, the undoing of Lucina also — to
the throne for love of her. She submits in

FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN" 239

appearance, and at a great public banquet crowns
him with the imperial wreath. But the wreath is
poisoned, and he dies amid the acclamations of
" Hail, Caesar ! " with the Bacchic melodies of
" God Lyaeus, ever young," sounding in his ears.

The incurable fault of Valentinian as a tragedy
is now apparent. It lies in the inadequate
motives provided by the action of Maximus after
Lucina's death. Up to that date, Fletcher had
suggested nothing in his character which prepares
us for the fraud he works on Aecius in order to
secure his revenge ; and no sooner have we
condoned that baseness on the hypothesis that
grief had maddened him, than we are asked to
accept the intrusion of ambition into his nature,
and the outrageous indecency of his feigned
avowals to Eudoxia, with even less of explana-
tion. In one word, Maximus, upon whom the
whole conduct of the drama turns, has been
wantonly and cynically used as a mere machine
for evolving a succession of stirring scenes.
The romantic playwright, the rhetorical dramatist,
is content to sacrifice psychological coherence,
probability, and the facts of history for the sake
of a magnificent but insufficiently developed
series of effects.

It would be unfair to stigmatize Beaumont
and Fletcher as the only, or indeed as the chief,
sinners in this respect among our early play-

240 FLETCHER'S " VALENTINIAN"

wrights. When the English drama settled into
its romantic form, after the attempts made by
the authors of Gorboduc and others to mould it
on a classical type, it was already committed to
the dramatisation of stories ; and stones, so
long as they presented striking situations and a
fable of exciting interest, were welcomed without
due regard for their artistic suitableness to tragic
presentation. In an Italian novella, ill-developed
motives and psychological incoherences of all
sorts were excusable or passed unnoticed, the
narrator dealing lightly with his material, and
holding the attention of his audience only for
the brief space of half an hour or so. But
these defects, when transferred to the exacting
sphere of the drama, which demands more
detailed working out of character and a
firmer grasp upon causation, became glaringly
apparent, and formed the main source of
weakness in the tragedies of nearly all our
playwrights. It is because Beaumont and
Fletcher possessed such brilliant gifts in rich
abundance, and because they adorned their
romances with such delightful eloquence,
falling only just short of the higher poetry
and the more poignant dramatic imagination,
that I have submitted the composite work
which passes under their joint names to a
seemingly severe criticism.

THE LYRISM OF THE ENGLISH
ROMANTIC DRAMA

THE most prominent feature of the English
Romantic or Elizabethan Drama is a predomin-
ance of high-strung poetry in all its parts.
When we compare this drama with that of Italy
or of France at the same epoch, or even with
that of Athens in the classical period, its charac-
teristic quality is found to be a diffusion of
lyrical poetry through every fibre, vein, and
tissue of its vital structure.

The conception of character and the choice of
situations in our drama are always poetical.
Imagination never fails, even when the construc-
tion of the plot is lamentably defective. The
playwright, in his diction, in his images and
metaphors, in his rhetorical embroidery, in his
handling of blank-verse, exhibits a poetic faculty
which sometimes conceals the poverty of his
dramatic resources. It often happens that the

Q

242 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

effect of dialogue or soliloquy is dramatically
weakened by the abundance of imagery and the
wealth of fancy lavished by the poet. The tone
of diction proper to dramatic utterance frequently
exhales in lyrisms. These " lyrical interbreath-
ings," as Coleridge called them with admirable
nicety of phrase, are exquisitely charming. To the
student in his chamber they offer new delights at
every turning of the page. They appeal to his
imagination ; they stimulate his sense of beauty
and of passion in the outer and the inner worlds
of nature and mankind. But they tend to clog
and interrupt the business of the scene. In the
hands of playwrights of the second order, of
Fletcher for example, these " lyrical interbreath-
ings," constantly repeated, degenerate into a
kind of poetical rhetoric, which excuses or cloaks
a want of dramatic sincerity, a feeble grasp on
the essential conditions of character and action.

The lyrical element, which I have attempted
to describe, was not peculiar to the drama. It
pervaded all species of poetry in the Elizabethan
age. That was the time when music flourished
in England. We had then a native school of
composers, and needed not to borrow the melo-
dies of other lands. Every house had its lute
suspended on the parlour-wall. In every com-
pany of men and women part-songs could be
sung. When poets sat down to write, music

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 243

sounded in their ears. Their thoughts and
rhythms moved instinctively to vocal tunes. Thus
we find that the epical, narrative, and meditative
verse of the period, no less than the dramatic,
was penetrated with lyrism. Many of the finest
passages in the Faery Queen seem written to be
sung. The lyric cry is audible throughout
Marlowe's Hero and Leander ; not only in its
high uplifted passion, but also in the tense and
quivering movement of the lines. Shakespeare's
sonnets are lyrical, both in their structure and
their tone. In this respect they differ from the
sonnets of Milton, where the gnomic or reflective
element predominates.

The dramatists, not unnaturally, felt this lyric
impulse. It is the function of the drama in all
ages to reflect the very form and pressure of the
time in which it flourishes. The material con-
ditions of the English theatre were also favour-
able to the development of a lyrical element in
our drama. In the absence of scenery or stage-
decorations appeal had to be made to the imagin-
ation of the spectators. That was done by
raising the accent of poetic speech to such a pitch
that the wildest flights of fancy emphasized the
playwright's meaning. There were only men and
boys upon the wooden platform of the stage.
What these actors uttered had to bring distant
scenes within the vision of the audience ; their

244 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

lines interpreted subtle changes of emotion, sud-
den reverses of fortune, the flux and reflux of
passion in human hearts ; and all this had to
be presented with nothing but a bare background,
with the open sky above, with people in hats and
trunk-hose sitting, smoking, jostling the players
on the stage. That being so, it is not wonderful
that the playwright used the lyric note, the note
of high impassioned poetry, to stimulate the fancy
of his audience, and to carry them away with him
into the realm of the ideal. He could not act upon
their sense of sight, as the modern playwright
does. Unless he pierced their intellectual sense,
he failed to rivet their attention. It is thus, at
any rate, that I partly explain to myself the
lyrism of the English drama.

In plain words, the bias of poetical literature
in England during the Elizabethan age was
lyrical. The drama obeyed that bias. And the
conditions of the London stage favoured a style
of writing for the theatre which was eminently
lyrical.

We see this in Marlowe, the founder of our
theatre. Those famous " lunes " of Tamburlaine,
those descants upon beauty, those apostrophes to
divine Xenocrate", those fierce forth-stretchings
after universal empire, are lyrical : lyrical not
only in their tone and sentiment, but also in the
form and exaltation of the verses which express

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 245

them. The serious part of Faustus is a sus-
tained lyric. The philosopher in his study
evokes the image of

Women, or unwedded maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.

He cries to the fiend who buys and sells him :

Had I as many souls as there be stars,
I'd give them all for Mephistophilis.

When Helen appears to him in a vision, he
exclaims :

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,

And burned the topless towers of Ilium ? —

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss —

O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

When he appeared to hapless Semele ;

More lovely than the monarch of the sky

In wanton Arethusa's azured arms;

And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

The lyrical accent here is unmistakable.
Preserving the form of dramatic verse, keeping
well to his decasyllabic metre, Marlowe soars
aloft into that higher region of poetry where
music is demanded. He does not rely upon the
decoration or the business of the stage : he forces

246 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

the audience, by poetry, by the evocation of their
sympathies, by a keen lyric cry, to comprehend
the dramatic situation.

If we abstract the lyrical passages from
Tantburlaine and Faustus there remains but
little noteworthy in these plays. The case is
different with Edward II. Here Marlowe con-
structs a tragedy, which would be forcibly
dramatic without its lyrical element. The lyrism
survives. It is particularly potent in the scene
of Edward's abdication. But the action and the
passions move almost without its help. The
lyric, which was nearly everything in Tambur-
laine and Faustus, has become a subordinate
quantity in Edward II.

At the point which Marlowe reached in
Edward II. , Shakespeare took his art up.
Shakespeare always regarded the dramatic move-
ment of the play first. But he never neglected
the lyrical element. He recognised this as a
main point in the romantic drama, which he was
born to perfect. And he has more than once or
twice written plays which are purely lyrical in
their construction.

It will suffice to mention Romeo and Juliet.
This is a lyrical poem, dramatically presented.
As a German critic has remarked, Romeo and
Juliet combines the sonnet, the epithalamium, and
the aubade — three types of lyrical poetry — under

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 247

one dramatic form. The whole play is a Chant
d' Amour — an exhalation of human love, in poetry
assuming the dramatic mantle. All the incidents
of action fall away and sink into their place
before the simple fact that Romeo loves Juliet,
and Juliet loves Romeo. This play is the lyric
cry converted into drama.

It would be easy to show by copious illustra-
tions how lyrically conceived and executed is the
tragedy of Richard II. Nor would it be difficult
to point out in what way Love's Labour's Lost falls
short of being a good comedy by its dependence
upon lyrical rhymed structures in the metre, and
by its incongruous admixture of high lyric flights
of passion — Biron's ecstatic extravaganzas — with
satirical humour and frank buffoonery. This
play, in some respects one of the most charming
of Shakespeare's earliest efforts, closing as it
does upon the note of one of his most genial and
native songs, does not indeed deserve the name
of a comedy, but rather that of some ethereal
variety-entertainment, because of its imperfectly
assimilated lyrism. Far more finely mingled
are the elements of comedy and lyric in A
Midsummer Night's Dream, which is really a
dramatic romance, interweaving three separate
strains of poetry — the heroic in Theseus, the
amorous in the two pairs of lovers, the fantastic
in the fairies — with one strain of burlesque,

248 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

toned exquisitely into keeping with the major
parts. I should like lastly to demonstrate how
The Tempest, a work of Shakespeare's maturity,
is a pure ideal lyric, converted by the master's
wonder-working wand into an effective drama for
the stage, without the sacrifice of its dominant
quality, but rather by the maintenance of the
lyric note throughout. Descending to the com-
positions of minor playwrights, it is enough to
mention Dekker's Old Fortunatus, Day's Parlia-
ment of Bees, Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, and
many of the later romantic tragi-comedies, in
which the lyrism of the English drama is most
noticeable.

Marlowe proved in Edward II. that a tragedy
could be constructed, which was not dependent
on its lyrical element, but which used that only
for purposes of occasional rhetoric and powerful
appeal to the imagination of the audience. The
type which he then fixed became the standard for
his immediate successors.

This brings us back to what Coleridge called
the " lyrical interbreathings " of the romantic
drama, and necessitates a closer examination of
those portions of non-lyrical plays in which the
dramatic style modulates into the lyric.

The passages in Shakespeare's tragedies and
comedies where dialogue or soliloquy soars into
the empyrean of impassioned poetry are so fre-

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 249

quent, and some of them are so famous, that it
is needless to do more than allude to them in
passing. Macbeth's declamation on the vanity
of life, when he hears the news of the Queen's
death ; Perdita's melodious enumeration of spring-
flowers ; Claudio's horror-stricken meditation on
the state of disembodied spirits ; the narrative of
Ophelia's drowning ; the last speeches of Antony
and Cleopatra — especially that sublime cry of
hers :

/ am again for Cydnus,
To meet Mark Antony!—'

all these illustrate what I mean by dramatic style
transfigured, raised to lyrical intensity. So are
some of those brief snatches which occur occa-
sionally in almost unexpected places, as when
Timon dismisses the Athenian senators :

Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood ;
Whom once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover.

So, again, are those vignetted pictures, and
freaks of roving fancy, which present an episode
idealized, and strike the keynote of its purified
emotion. A good instance of this is when
Lorenzo and Jessica exchange their lovers'
thoughts by means of musical allusions — a

250 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

sustained and measured dialogue in antiphonal
descant — beneath the flooding moonlight in the
Park at Belmont :

LOR. In such a night

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.

JES. In such a night

Medea gathered the enchanted herbs
That did renew old Aeson.

This uplifting of dramatic into lyrical style in
dialogue and soliloquy is common to all those of
the Elizabethan playwrights who were gifted
with a genuine poetic faculty. We find it
everywhere in Fletcher's romantic plays. I
need not cull examples from The Faithful Shep-
herdess, for that is obviously lyrical throughout.
I will rather allude in passing to Ordella's
panegyric on death in Thierry and Theodoret; to
Memnon's address to his young mistress in The
Mad Lover; to Aspatia's impassioned vision of
Ariadne on the desert island iii The Maid's
Tragedy. These are doubtless too familiar to
call for quotation in full. But a passage may be
selected from The Custom of the Country — that
comedy which might be called a dung-heap
strewn with pearls — to illustrate the specific
quality of Fletcher's lyrism :

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 251

Strew all your withered flowers, your autumn

sweets,

By the hot sun ravished of bud and beauty,
Thus round about her bride-bed ; hang these blacks

there,

The emblems of her honour lost : all joy
That leads a virgin to receive her lover,
Keep from this place ; all fellow maids that bless

her,

And blushing do unloose her zone, keep from her ;
No merry noise, nor lusty songs, be heard here,
Nor full cups crowned with wine make the rooms

giddy :

This is no masque of mirth, but murdered honour.
Sing mournfully that sad epithalamion
I gave thee now ; and, prithee, let thy lute weep.

We note the same ascent to lyrism in Hey-
wood. When Mr. Frankford, in A Woman
Killed with Kindness, is approaching and leaving
his wife's bedchamber, and again when he
discovers the lute which she has left behind her
in the desecrated home, he breaks into solilo-
quies ringing with a wounded heart-cry. The
intensity of the situation changes the accent of
the verse. One of these three passages will
serve as an example :

O God ! O God ! that it were possible
To undo things done ; to call back yesterday !
That time could turn up his swift sandy glass
To untell the days, and to redeem these hours !

252 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

Or that the sun

Could, rising from the west, draw his coach back-
ward ;

Take from the account of time so many minutes,
Till he had all these seasons called again,
Those minutes, and those actions done in them,
Even from her first offence ; that I might take her
A s spotless as an angel in my arms !
But, oh! I talk of things impossible,
And cast beyond the moon"

It is the same with Webster, with Dekker,
with Ford, with Marston. Even Ben Jonson,
that strict master of severity in style, indulges
now and then in flights of lyrism. Level's
dissertation upon Platonic affection, in The New
Inn, is an example ; so too are the opening lines
about Earine in The Sad Shepherd.

We have now seen that the characteristic note
of the English romantic drama is a predom-
inance of high-strung poetry in all its parts.
This poetry, even in the blank-verse passages,
assumes a lyrical quality. But the spirit of this
poetry goes farther ; climbs higher ; and the
final point to which it soars, claims our attention
next. The lyrical element, on which I have
been so long insisting as the very mainspring of
English romantic art, culminates and finds free
expression in the songs which are scattered up
and down each play. These songs cannot be
regarded as occasional ditties, interpolated for

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 253

the delectation of the audience. On the con-
trary, they strike the key-note of the playwright's
style. They condense the particular emotion of
the tragedy or comedy in a quintessential drop
of melody. Mr. Pater has dwelt upon a single
instance of this fact with his usual felicity of
phrase. Speaking of the song of Mariana's
page in Measure for Measure, he remarks that in
it " the kindling power and poetry of the whole
play seems to pass for a moment into an actual
strain of music." The same might be said
about the two songs in the second act of As You
Like it, Ariel's songs in The Tempest, and all the
fairy lyrics of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
What painters call their accent, the highest value
in their pictures, we find in these dramatic
lyrics. It only requires a moment's reflection to
perceive in how true a sense the little poems
written by the dramatist for music at a certain
point in his play, give the accent of his style,
the highest value in his scheme of composition.
This is very clear when we consider the dirges
introduced by Webster into The Duchess of Malfi,
and Vittoria Corombona. The sombre genius of
the poet, his sinister philosophy of life, the
terrible gloom of his tragic motives, are epito-
mized in those funeral ditties. In like manner,
the theme of Fletcher's Valentinian is accen-
tuated by the two songs of the second act ; and

254 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

the whole spirit of The Maid's Tragedy lives in
Aspatia's dirge :

Lay a garland, on my hearse,

Of the dismal yew ;
Maidens, willow branches bear;

Say, I died true.

My love was false, but I was firm

From my hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lie

Lightly, gentle earth!

Ford, though he was not one of the best
lyrists of this period, managed to sublimate the
motive of his tragedy, The Broken Heart, in
three songs, " Can you paint a thought ? " " Oh,
no more, no more, too late," and " Glories,
pleasures, pomps, delights, and ease."

This is equally true of comedies or drama-
tized romances. Dekker's lyrics in The Pleasant
Comedy of Patient Grissell yield at once the
purest accent of his own poetic quality and the
highest value of the play in which they occur.
Hey wood's song, " Ye little birds that sit and
sing," is the culminating point of his Fair Maid
of the Exchange. The spirit of the man and the
spirit of the work of art are both extracted and
etherealized in the four stanzas of that exquisitely
transparent ditty.

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 255

I have now made it clear in what way I think
the songs which are scattered through our drama
deserve to be carefully studied ; first as the
ultimate expression of that lyrism to which the
romantic species in England was always tend-
ing ; and secondly, as an index to the play-
wright's specific quality as poet.

Some of our dramatists were defective in the
lyrical faculty. Their blank-verse lyrism is
rather rhetorical than poetical ; and their songs
are mediocre. Massinger is of this sort ; so,
but in a less degree, is Middleton ; and Shirley
might be classed with them, had he not be-
queathed to us the two immortal odes upon the
vanity of human power and glory, from Cupid
and Death and The Contention of Ajax.

Ben Jonson rarely struck the note of genuine
inevitable lyric inspiration. None of the songs
in his plays can be called perfect in their music.
Beside being stiff through labour of the file,
they are often awkward in some turn or other of
expression. The best to my mind are the
" Hymn to Diana," in Cynthia 's Revels, and the
" Ode to Charis," introduced from Underwoods
into The Devil is an Ass. It may interest some
of my readers to learn that the third stanza of
this beautiful poem was parodied by Sir John
Suckling in The Sad One. Jonson had writ-
ten:

256 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

Have you seen but a bright lily grow

Before rude hands have touched it?
Have marked but the fall of the snow

Before the soil hath smutched it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver,

Or swan's down ever?
Or have smelt o' the bud of the brier,

Or the nard in the fire ?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee ?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she !

Suckling converted this to his own use as
follows :

Hast thou seen the down in the air,

When wanton blasts have tossed it?
Or the ship on the sea,

When ruder winds have crossed it?
Hast thou marked the crocodile's weeping,

Or the fox's sleeping ?
Or hast thou viewed the peacock in his pride,

Or the dove by his bride,

When he courts for his lechery ?
Oh ! so fickle, oh ! so vain, oh ! so false, so false
is she!

The execution of the lyric in Volpone, " Come,
my Celia, let us prove," is excellent. These
couplets might be reckoned among Jonson's
successes, did they not challenge fatal com-
parison with the Ode of Catullus, from which
they are in part borrowed, but of which they are
in no true sense an adequate translation. The

257

song from The Silent Woman, " Still to be neat,
still to be drest," transplanted into English from
the Latin of Jean Bonnefons, deserves honour-
able mention ; not only for its terseness and
correction, but also because it plainly foreshad-
owed and probably helped to form the lyric style
of the seventeenth century. If we may trust
Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson thought
highly of his drinking-song in The Poetaster. It
does not find a place in the best anthologies of
songs from the dramatists. I shall therefore
produce it here ; for it illustrates what I mean
by Jonson's awkwardness of phrase ; and if he
really set great store upon this little ode, it also
illustrates his incapacity for just self-criticism :

Swell me a bowl with lusty wine,
Till I may see the plump Lyaus swim

A bove the brim :
I drink as I would write
In flowing measure filled with flame and sprite.

This is certainly inferior in poetry and rhythm
to Fletcher's "God Lyasus ever young," and to
Lyly's "O for a bowl of fat canary," which
reappears improved in one of Middleton's
comedies.* Beautiful lyrical extracts may be
culled from Jonson's Masques. But these are
only fragments, scattered stanzas, occasional

• A Mad World, my Afasten.

258 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

flights above the poet's ordinary mood — like that
fine passage from the Queen's Masque, prefiguring
the style of Dryden's odes, which begins, " So
beauty on the waters stood " — like the description
of an ocean paradise in The Fortunate Isles, " The
winds are sweet and gently blow" — like the
dirge for withered spring-flowers in Pan's Anni-
versary', " Drop, drop, you violets, change your
hues."* Indeed Jonson, with all his fine poetic
feeling, was not sure of touch enough, nor exact-
ing enough in his taste, to produce lyrics of a
sustained excellence. The one absolutely fault-
less song he wrote, " Drink to me only with
thine eyes," is absent from his dramatic works.

One playwright of the highest eminence, and
two of the second order, Marlowe, Cyril Tourneur,
and Marston, have no songs printed in their
plays. This does not prove, however, that they
wrote none ; for publishers, at that period, were
not always careful to retain the lyrics when they
sent an author's plays to press. It also appears
that stage-ditties were regarded as common
property. In the case of Marston, stage directions
are frequently given for the introduction of music
and singing. But whether his own lyrics were
used on those occasions cannot now be determined.

* The text of the Masque gives " Drop, drop, your violets." Since
the violets are obviously addressed in the following lines, it seems to
me that your must here be a misprint for you.

Marlowe had the lyrical faculty in over-measure.
I have already pointed out what a large part
blank-verse lyrism plays in his tragedies. It
must therefore be left to conjecture whether he
chose to dispense with the element of song, or
whether in the printing of his plays the lyrics
were omitted. In the latter case, we have
suffered grievous wrong from the publishers of
his dramatic works. But I am inclined to believe,
from the stage-business of Marlowe's tragedies,
that the detached lyric formed no portion of his
scheme. Did we possess none but the original
editions of Lyly's comedies, we should have to
mourn the loss of those charming songs, which
form the best part of Lyly's literary bequest to
posterity. They were introduced by Edward
Blount into the complete edition of 1632. With
regard to Tourneur, there is no reason to suppose
that he was incapable of writing songs superior
to those of Ford, and not inferior to Webster's.
The lyrisms in his blank-verse are magnificently
poignantly fantastic.

Two collections of dramatic lyrics have been
published in this century. The first, called
Songs from the Dramatists, by Robert Bell, has
long been out of print. The second, edited by
Mr. A. H. Bullen, under the title of Lyrics from
Elizabethan Dramatists, bears the date of 1889.
These books, both of which are valuable, have a

somewhat different scope and diverse merits.
Mr. Bell begins earlier, and ends later. His
first entries are the five lyrics from Ralph Roister
Doister. His last are five songs from the comedies
of Sheridan. Mr. Bullen starts with Lyly, and
finishes with Jasper Mayne and Thomas Forde,
contemporaries of Milton. Though Mr. Bell
covers a larger ground, he is neither so complete
nor so scholarly as Mr. Bullen. His anthology,
delightful and useful as it is, bears the air of
dilettante reading and caprice. Mr. Bullen is
well-nigh exhaustive within the limits he has
assigned to himself. He has also reproduced
for the first time many interesting pieces which
were known to few but specialists. I may
mention, in particular, the lyrics of Thomas Nash,
all of which are well worth study ; of Peter
Hausted, William Habington, and Richard Brome,
whose charming spring ditty from The Jolly
Beggars was unaccountably omitted by Mr. Bell.
It is to be hoped that future editions of this
collection will incorporate those earlier pieces
which we find in Bell's anthology, adding perhaps
the fresh and simple April song which opens
the Morality of Lusty Juventus.

In the next essay I propose to consider two
volumes of Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books,
and the works of Dr. Thomas Campion, edited
by Mr. Bullen. It is interesting to compare the

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 261

contents of these collections, songs written for
music and not intended for the drama, with the
Lyrics from Elizabethan Dramatists. Surveying
the whole mass of poems here presented, we
first observe the common note which marks
them all out as the product of one period,
the outcome of one national sensibility. The
style throughout is the style of that Renais-
sance movement which took hold of England in
the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and
which spent its force before the restoration of
the Stuarts. There is no mistaking the similarity
of tone and accent in all the lyrics written during
that memorable space of somewhat more than
fifty years. They have a spontaneity, a bird-
like freshness, an irrecoverable facility of sing-
ing, which has never been recaptured in the
centuries which followed. This divine quality
of careless inspiration they possess in common.
But when we look closer, we find that the
dramatic lyrics differ in important respects from
those of the song-books. The latter are always
more" generic, vaguer, broader in their emotion.
They were intended to be sung in every place
where men and women met together for society
and recreation. Consequently, their authors
tuned them to what Browning called " the common
chord," " the C major of this life. The songs of
the dramatists, on the other hand, cannot easily

262 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

be detached from their context, from the situations
they were meant to accentuate. The playwrights
wrote them, as I have attempted to prove, in
order to give the highest value, to strike the
key-note of their compositions. Perhaps we ought
not to ascribe deliberate intention to the authors
of these stage songs. But being penetrated with
the dramatic situation, this forced them, con-
sciously or unconsciously, to a special treatment
of the lays they wrote for it. Therefore, the
emotion expressed is specific, definite, connected
with the particular movement and motive of the
plays where they occur. It follows that the
dramatic song is more intense, high-pitched, and
thrilling, than the lyric meant for chamber music.
There is more concentrated stuff of thought and
passion directed to a single psychological moment
in its poetry.

I do not wish to assert that this is invariably
the case. Examples might be culled from the
drama in which the song is only interpolated as
a pleasing ditty. Examples, again, might be
selected from Campion, in which the song seems
to demand a dramatic setting. But, broadly
speaking, I think that this distinction holds good.

I have treated our romantic drama from the
point of view of lyric poetry, and have tried to
demonstrate its constant striving after lyrical ex-
pression in the handling of blank verse, and the

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA 263

culmination of that effort in the songs written to
illustrate certain leading motives or decisive
situations of the action.

This position is confirmed when we pass from
the Elizabethan to the Restoration playwrights.
The Comedy of the Restoration was essentially
non-lyrical ; and that is equally true of its
tragedy. Even in Otway we do not discover the
lyrical interbreathings which were so marked a
feature of Elizabethan literature. Dryden gives
us plenty of robust declamation and sonorous
rhetoric ; but the note of his drama is not poeti-
cal. As might be expected, the songs of this
period are defective in poetic feeling and fancy.
Some of Congreve's have an exquisite finish, a
sparkling brilliancy ; but their finish and their
sparkle are those of a paste diamond. Dryden
wrote rough, commonplace, and tawdry lyrics for
the stage. I will quote a stanza from The Spanish
Friar , which deserves attention, not only because
it exhibits the extraordinary want of charm in
Dryden's stage-songs, but also because it first
exemplified the metrical scheme which Swinburne
adopted for his Garden of Proserpine :

Farewell, ungrateful traitor,

Farewell, my perjured swain I

Let never injured creature
Believe a man again.

264 THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC DRAMA

The pleasure of possessing
Surpasses all expressing :
But 'tis too short a blessing,
And love too long a pain.

Mr. Swinburne deserves credit for having
perceived the capacities of this stanza, and for
constructing the silk purse of his immortal poem
out of such a veritable sow's ear.

LYRICS FROM ELIZABETHAN
SONG-BOOKS

THERE arc epochs in the literature of nations
when something resembling clairvoyance into
poetry — a true instinct as to its conditions,
together with the power of shaping language
in accordance with this intuition — seems to be
universally distributed throughout the people.
Such an epoch , in the case of England, was that
to which Elizabeth gave her name, although it
extended in duration considerably beyond the
queen's lifetime. Throughout this period we
find the English singularly gifted with dramatic
and lyrical genius.

The songs of the time have a freshness and
a certainty of cadence, as of some bird's note.
Those scattered through the drama are compara-
tively well known. But we have only in recent
days become acquainted with the verses written

266 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

for chamber-music, many of which are no less
rare and beautiful.

The first collection of lyrics reprinted from
old English song-books, so far as I am aware,
was Mr. Thomas Oliphant's Musa Madrigalesca,
published in 1837. It contained a liberal
anthology from Byrd, Dowland, Weelkes, Morley,
Wilbye, Gibbons, Ford, Vautor, and three
anonymous sources — Melismata, Pammelia, Deu-
teromelia — which have been ascribed with pro-
bability to Thomas Ravenscroft. Mr. Oliphant
added much curious bibliographical and bio-
graphical information, together with copious dis-
cursive notes. Yet his book is, on the whole,
unsatisfactory ; for the compiler exercised no
critical discrimination, but admitted the veriest
trash of bad translations from the Italian, side by
side with exquisite gems of English composi-
tion.

Between the years 1879 and 1883 Professor
Arber, to whose indefatigable industry and exact
scholarship our literature is indebted for so many
recovered treasures, printed entire collections of
Byrd, Yonge, Campion, Rosseter, Dowland,
Alison, and Wilbye.

Adhering to his fixed principles in dealing
with such reprints, Arber reproduced the origi-
nal texts of these old books without alteration
in successive volumes of his English Garner.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 267

Though accessible to students, and eminently
valuable by their textual fidelity, these republi-
cations are hardly calculated to make the lyrics
from the song-books widely popular. Like
Oliphant's anthology, they diffused a good deal
of inferior literary matter, together with much
that was both admirable and new. Campion's
and Rosseter's songs, in particular, opened up a
mine of exquisite lyrical melody, the existence of
which had been forgotten.

In 1883, Mr. W. J. Linton's collection, entitled
Rare Poems of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Cen-
turies, showed what use for purely literary purposes
could be made of the Elizabethan song-books.
While culling pieces from eminent authors —
Sidney, Jonson, Beaumont, Waller, Lovelace and
Marvell — Mr. Linton drew freely upon Dowland,
Byrd, Morley, Wilbye, Weelkes, Ford, Farmer,
and the other sources edited by Oliphant and
Arber.

It remained for Mr. A. H. Bullen to present
the public with a full and critical selection of the
choicest pieces. His Lyrics from the Song-Books
of the Elizabethan Age, which appeared in 1887,
resumed the labours of his predecessors, and
widely extended the field of research. This
volume has been followed by a second, under
the same title. Not only has Mr. Bullen care-
fully examined and collected the song-books

268 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

previously edited by Oliphant and Arber; but
he has disinterred large numbers of entirely new
lyrics, partly from rare copies extant in public
and private libraries, partly also from MS.
sources undreamed of by the ordinary student
and inaccessible to nearly every one. The result
is that his anthologies are, without comparison,
the richest in variety of materials. But that is
not their only feature. What renders them of
special value from the point of view of literature,
as distinguished from scholarship, is that he has
employed a fine critical taste and sound judgment
in making his selections. Those who shall take
the trouble to compare his specimens from Byrd,
Yonge, Dowland, Campion, Alison, and Wilbye,
with Arber's reprints, will find that he has
skimmed the cream for us, beside introducing
many fresh jewels of bright and delicate lustre.

These lyrics from the song-books have not the
intensity of some songs introduced into dramas
of the Elizabethan period. They are rarely so
high-strung and weighty with meaning as Web-
ster's dirges, or as Ford's and Shirley's solemn
descants on the transitiveness of earthly love
and glory. Nor again do we often welcome in
them that fulness of romantic colour, which
makes the lyrics of Beaumont and Fletcher so
resplendent. This is, perhaps, because their
melodies are not the outgrowth of dramatic

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 269

situations, but have their life and being in the
more aerial element of musical sound. For the
purposes of singing they are exactly adequate,
being substantial enough to sustain and animate
the notes, and yet so slight as not to overburden
these with too much reflection and emotion. We
feel that they have arisen spontaneously from
the natural and facile marrying of musical words
to musical phrases ; they are the right and
fitting verbal counterpart to vocal and instru-
mental melody ; limpid, liquid, never surcharging
the notes which need them as a vehicle with
complexities of fancy, involutions of thought, or
the disturbing tyranny of vehement passions. It
is clear in many cases that the literary and the
musical parts of these delicious compositions
were begotten simultaneously. This is the
right quality of song ; the presence of this
indicates true familiarity with musical require-
ments in England of the sixteenth century.

Who were the authors of these lyrics ? That
is a difficult question to answer. The large
majority must be accepted as anonymous, or in
the more delicate language of the old Greeks, as
" masterless," a^sairora. It would be uncritical
to assume that the composers of the music, under
whose names the books were issued, always
wrote their own poetry. Indeed, the contrary
can sometimes easily be proved ; for we find

270 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

pieces by Sidney, Dyer, Drayton, and other
well-known poets, set to melodies. There is,
however, a strong presumption in favour of the
belief that John Dowland, Robert Jones, and
Thomas Campion, wrote their own words. The
greatest of these men was Campion ; and he has
now at last, through Mr. Bullen's complete edition
of his works, been restored to his right place
among the first and best of English lyrists. In
the preface to his Third Book of Airs, Campion
remarks : " In these English Airs I have chiefly
aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly
together ; which will be much for him to do that
hath not power over both." I take this to be
pretty conclusive proof, if other proof from the
testimony of contemporaries were wanting, that
Campion composed both words and notes in the
pieces published under his own name. Still, we
must not assume that every song in Campion's
books belongs to him. The evidence for John
Dowland's authorship is not quite so clear. Yet
the identity of style presented by those " rich
clusters of golden verse " — so Mr. Bullen describes
the songs in Dowland's books — together with the
absence from his prefaces of any reference to
other writers, will justify our hailing his touch
on language as no less heavenly than Richard
Barnfield found his touch upon the lute to be.
The songs of Robert Jones are in like manner

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 271

marked by signs of an individual style, which can
be best explained by supposing that he made his
own verses.

When we come to classify the topics of these
lyrics, it will be convenient to divide them
roughly under a few headings, (i) The first
group is composed of sacred ditties, hymns, in-
vocations, prayers, psalms of repentance, and
thanksgivings. (2) The second group includes
little poems upon human life, of that nature
which the Greeks called gnomic. Proverbial
wisdom is here expressed in flowing verse.
(3) The third group embraces the wide and
universal theme of love. We have to subdivide
it into songs of wooing supplicating love, of love
triumphant and enjoyed, of sorrowing and pining
love, of love rejected, of scornful and disdainful
love, and lastly of light love and ephemeral
flirtation. As will be readily conceived, this
third group is by far the largest. Some of its
lyrics are direct and poignant, arrows shot from
the bow-strings of the heart in moments of
unreflective feeling. Others assume the gentle
affectation of the pastoral style, which lends
itself so prettily to musical effect. In the former,
I and thou, the immortal personages of the heart's
duet, sing their undying descant from the solitude
of soul to soul. In the latter, Phyllis and Cory-
don, Thoralis and Lycidas, shepherd their flocks

272 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

upon green lawns, and bend beribboned crooks
to the swaying of leafy boughs in spring or
summer. (4) A fourth group contains humorous
songs of many sorts ; some frankly comic, some
fitted for drinking-bouts and tavern-company,
some satirical, some trenching on the sphere of
politics. (5) To a fifth group, though it is a
small one, I would consign those compositions
which deal with the praise of music, as an
element in man's spiritual life.

It is my purpose to present a few choice
specimens of these several groups in turn. I
shall confine myself to Mr. Bullen's two volumes,
and, where I think this possible, I shall give the
author's name of each piece. These specimens
must be regarded only as samples, chosen, partly
at haphazard, partly through some personal sense
in me of their peculiar beauty. Many of the songs
which I omit to quote, will seem, in other eyes
than mine, of equal or superior excellence. What
Byrd wrote in the preface to his first collection
of English songs, holds good in a far wider sense
than he intended : — " Benign reader, here is
offered unto thy courteous acceptance, music of
sundry sorts, and to content divers humours." Out
of the hundreds of lyrics which Mr. Bullen has
selected, every man of taste and feeling will form
a different anthology of fifty. That is the charm
of this large river-head of song. We can all fill

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 273

our own pitchers at its fount of melody, and each
will be surprised to find that his neighbour has
brought something different away.

From the first group, that of pious songs, I will
begin by selecting one by Thomas Campion :

Awake, awake! thou heavy sprite

That sltep'st the deadly sleep of sin I

Rise now and walk the ways of light,
'Tis not too late yet to begin.

Seek heaven early, seek it late;

True faith finds still an open gate.

Get up, get up, thou leaden man!

Thy track to endless joy or pain,
Yields but the model of a span :

Yet burns out thy life's lamp in vain!
One minute bounds thy fame or bliss ;
Then watch and labour while time is.

Another of Campion's religious pieces has the
merit of simplicity and unaffected piety.

View me, Lord, a work of Thine !

Shall I then lie drowrfd in night?
Might Thy grace in me but shine,

I should seem made all of light.

But my soul still surfeits so

On the poison'd baits of sin,
That I strange and ugly grow;

All is dark and foul withi*

274 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

Cleanse me, Lord, that I may kneel
At Thine altar pure and, white:

They that once Thy mercies feel,
Gaze no more on earth's delight.

Worldly joys like shadows fade

When the heavenly light appears:
But the covenants Thou hast made,
Endless, know not days nor years.

In Thy Word, Lord, is my trust,

To Thy mercies fast I fly ;
Though I am but clay and dust,

Yet Thy grace can lift me high.

Here is a scrap from the MSS. preserved at
Christ Church Oxford, the metaphor of which
may serve as introduction to a far nobler com-
position from the same source :

Turn in, my Lord, turn into me,

My heart's a homely place;

But Thou canst make corruption flee,

A nd fill it with Thy grace :

So furnished it will be brave,

And a rich dwelling thou shalt have.

I hardly know with what words to preface the
next poem, only a fragment, alas ! as it appears
by the abrupt commencement. Its extreme
beauty of diction and dignity of phrase, its rich
and ample rhetoric, deep-coloured but subdued
in tone, mark it out for the work of no mere

ELIZABETHAN SONG -BOOKS 275

'prentice hand in poetry. Could we think of it
as Vaughan's ? Its style is grander than that
of Herbert, more exquisite than that of Jonson,
more pompous than that of Herrick. Happy
indeed was Mr. Bullen, when this jewel, luminous
by reason even of the fracture which has shivered
it, sparkled before his eyes among the dusty MSS.
in Christ Church Library !

Yet if his majesty our sovereign lord

Should of his own accord

Friendly himself invite,

And say "I'll be your guest to morrow night,"

How should we stir ourselves, call and command

All hands to work! "Let no man idle stand.

Set me fine Spanish tables in the hall,

See they befitted all;

Let there be room to eat,

And order taken that there want no meat.

See every sconce and candlestick made bright,

That without tapers they may give a light.

Look to the presence ! are the carpets spread,

The dais o'er the head,

The cushions in the chairs,

And all the candles lighted on the stairs?

Perfume the chambers, and in any case

Let each man give attendance in his place."

Thus if the king were coming would we do,

And 'twere good reason too;

For 'tis a duteous thing

To show all honour to an earthly king,

And after all our travail and our cost,

276 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

So fie be pleased, to think no labour lost.

But at the coming of the King of Heaven

All's set at six and seven :

We wallow in our sin,

Christ cannot find a chamber in the inn.

We entertain him always like a stranger,

And as at first still lodge him in a manger.

The music to these royal words was composed
by Thomas Ford. I wish that we could venture
to think that he wrote them. In that case
Thomas Ford would rank beside his illustrious
namesake, the tragic poet John Ford, as one of
the finest masters of our language. He was an
excellent musician, and made use of admirable
lyrics. Since I have introduced this subject, I
will submit two other poems which he set.

Since first I saw your face, I resolved to honour and
renown ye ;

If now I be disdained, I wish my heart had never
known ye.

What? I that loved and you that liked, shall we
begin to wrangle ?

No, no, no, my heart is fast, and cannot disen-
tangle.

If I admire or praise you tno much, that fault you

may forgive me ;
Or if my hands had strayed but a touch, then justly

might you leave me.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 277

/ asked your leave, you bade me love; is't now a
time to chide me ?

No, no, no, I'll love you still, what fortune e'er be-
tide me.

The sun whose beams most glorious are, rejecteth no

beholder ;
And your sweet beauty past compare made my poor

eyes the bolder.
Where beauty moves, and wit delights, and signs of

kindness bind me,
There, O there! where'er I go, I'll leave my heart

behind me.

This is in the grand style also, the style of
subdued and loyal passion, deep and calm as the
flow of a steady river. The next piece, again set
by Ford, is in a lighter key of feeling. Yet it
retains something of the superb chivalrous
manner. Both emotion and diction are noble.

There is a lady sweet and kind;
Was never face so pleased my mind :
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.

Her gesture, motion, and her smilest
Her wit, her voice, my heart beguiles,
Beguiles my heart, I know not why,
But yet I love her till I die.

Her free behaviour, winning looks,
Will make a lawyer burn his books;
I touched her not, alas ! not I ;
And yet I love her till I die.

278 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

Cupid is winged, and doth range;
Her country so my love doth change;
But change she earth, or change she sky,
Yet will I love her till I die.

If Thomas Ford really composed these three
pieces of poetry which he set to music, we must
henceforth look upon him as the writer of three
of the most touching lyrics in our language. I
will resume my selections from the religious airs
in the song-books. Take this little piece from
John Danyel's Songs for the Lute, Viol and Voice ,
1606. Notice how it is steeped in the shadow
of religious gloom and deep compunction.

If I could shut the gate against my thoughts
And keep out sorrow from this room within,

Or memory could cancel all the notes
Of my misdeeds, and I unthink my sin :

How free, how clear, how clean my soul should lie,

Discharged of such a loathsome company !

Or were there other rooms without my heart
That did not to my conscience join so near,

Where I might lodge the thoughts of sin apart
That I might not their clam'rous crying hear;

What peace, what joy, what ease should I Possess,

Freed from their horrors that my soul oppress !

But, O my Saviour, who my refuge art,
Let thy dear mercies stand 'twixt them and me,

And be the wall to separate my heart
So that I may at length repose me free ;

That peace, and joy, and rest may be within,

And I remain divided from my sin.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 279

One of Campion's compositions, upon the
border-land between pious ditties and gnomic
pieces, may here be introduced. The second
stanza, though impaired by a certain slightness
of execution, which is not unfrequent in Campion,
begins very nobly and has a high and lofty tone
of feeling.

To music bent is my retired mind

And fain would I some song of pleasure sing,

But in vain joys no comfort now I find,

From heavenly thoughts all true delight doth spring:

Thy power, O God, thy mercies to record,

Will sweeten every note and evevy word.

All earthly pomp or beauty to express
Is but to carve in snow, on waves to write;
Celestial things, though men conceive them less,
Yet fullest are they in themselves of light :
Such beams they yield as know no means to (tie,
Such heat they cast as lifts the spirit high.

Moral and sententious poems, embodying
maxims upon life, are common enough in these
collections. Most of them turn upon the bless-
ings of content, and upon the contrast between a
courtier's or statesman's life and that of humble
folk and peasants. The key-note is struck in
that famous poem, which Sidney's friend Sir
Edward Dyer is said to have written. William
Byrd set it to music in 1588.

28o ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

My mind to me a kingdom is :

Such perfect joy therein I find,

That it excels all other bliss

That God or nature hath assigned.

Though much I want, that most would have,

Yet still my mind forbids to crave.

More than one stanza need not be quoted from
a composition, already well-known to lovers of
our literature, while there are so many which
have escaped notice till the present date.

Here is something more original and fanciful,
also extracted from one of Byrd's books, 1611 :

In crystal towers and turrets richly set

With glittering gems that shine against the sun,

In regal rooms of jasper and of jet,

Content of mind not always likes to won;

But oftentimes it please th her to stay

In simple cotes enclosed with walls of clay.

The following in like manner distinguishes
itself from the common run of such compositions.
It occurs in John Mundy's Songs and Psalms,
1594:

Were I a king, I might command content;
Were I obscure, unknown should be my cares;
And were I dead, no thoughts should me torment,
Nor words, nor wrongs, nor cares, nor hopes, nor fears :
A doubtful choice, of three things one to crave —
A kingdom, or a cottage, or a grave.

ELIZABETHAN SONG -BOOKS 281

Thomas Campion, with his religious and philo-
sophical soul, was abundant in such strains of
poetry. I will select one little piece, which
illustrates the loose but genial manner of trans-
lation common at that time. It is modelled upon
Horace, and has generally been ascribed, but
without sufficient reason, as I think, to Lord
Bacon :

The man of life upright,

Whose guiltless heart is free

From all dishonest deeds,
Or thought of vanity.

The man whose silent days

In harmless joys are spentt
Whom hopes cannot delude

Nor sorrow discontent.

That man needs neither towers

Nor armour for defence,
Nor secret vaults to fly

From thunder's violence»

He only can behold

With unaffrighted eyes
The horrors of the deep

And terrors of the skiis.

Thus scorning all the cares

That fate or fortune brings,

He makes the heaven his book,
His wisdom heavenly things.

282 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

Good thoughts his only friends,
His wealth a well-spent age,

The earth his sober inn
And quiet pilgrimage.

It is now time to embark upon that mighty
sea of lyrics which deal with Love and Beauty.
The key-note shall be struck by one stanza from
a little jewel, set to music by a certain Captain
Tobias Hume. The poem itself, like so many
of the best in the Greek anthology, is master-
'ess a

0 Love, they wrong thee much
That say thy sweet is bitter,
When thy rich fruit is such
As nothing can be sweeter.
Fair house of joy and bliss,
Where truest pleasure is,

1 do adore thee;

I know thee what thou art,
I serve thee with my heart,
And fall before thee.

If that is not the nectar of the gods, distilled
in golden numbers, I know not where to find it.

Have I found her ? O rich finding !

Goddess-like for to behold ;
Her fair tresses seemly binding

In a chain of pearl and gold.
Chain me, chain me, O most fair,
Chain me to thee with that hair!

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 283

That, too, has no name of author. Yet it is
worthy, if not of Shakespeare, at least of the
romantic Fletcher. Listen to another, with the
dream of music in it. And notice how wonder-
fully the soul is tuned beforehand to its wavering
melodies by the first line, parent of the poem,
and parent doubtless of the air :

Give beatify all her right !

She's not to one form tied ;
Each shape yields fair delight,

Where her perfections bide :
Helen, I grant, might pleasing be,
And Rosamond was as sweet as she.

Some the quick eye commends,

Some swelling lips and red;
Pale looks have many friends,

Through sacred sweetness bred:
Meadows have flowers that pleasures move,
Though roses are the flowers of love.

Free beauty is not bound

To one unmoved clime;
She visits every ground,

And favours every time.
Let the old lords with mine compare;
My sovereign is as sweet and fair.

Something in the careless touch upon the
verse, and something in the metaphysical turn of
thought, betrays the authorship of Campion. A
rare poet indeed would Campion have been, had

284 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

not the music satisfied his sense of art in places
where the verbal melody runs shallow. Here is
a snatch of old song, also by Campion, in one
of his best moments ; an echo from Catullus :

My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love;

And though the sager sort our deeds reprove,

Let us not weigh them. Heaven's great lamps do dive

Into their west, and straight again revive;

But soon as once is set our little light,

Then must we sleep one ever-during night.

A lover says this to his lady :

Love not me for comely grace,
For my pleasing eye or face,
Nor for any outward part :
No, nor for a constant heart !
For these may fail or turn to ill :

So thou and I shall sever.
Keep therefore a true woman's eye,
A nd love me still, but know not why :
So hast thou the same reason still

To dote upon me ever.

In the next song, one of Thomas Campion's,
we can hear the lilt of the music sounding in its
rhythm :

KinJ are her answers,

But her performance kee/>s no day;

Breaks time, as dancers,

From their own music when they stray.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 285

All her free favours and smooth words
Wing my hopes in vain.
O, did ever voice so sweet but only feign ?
Can true love yield such delay,
Converting joy to pain.

Another by Campion, again with its key-note
in the leading line, opens thus :

Shall I come, sweet Love, to thee

When the evening beams are set?

Shall I not excluded be ?

Witt you find no feigned let ?

Let me not, for pity, more

Tell the long hours at your door.

Here is good advice to ladies :

Never love unless you can

Bear with all the faults of man :

Men will sometimes jealous be

Though but little cause they see;

And hang the head as discontent,

And speak what straight they will repent.

Men that but one saint adore
Make a show of love to more;
Beauty must be scorned in none,
Though but truly served in one:
For what is courtship but disguise ?
True hearts may have dissembling eyes.

286 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

Men, when their affairs require,
Must awhile themselves retire;
Sometimes hunt and sometimes hawk,
And not ever sit and talk :
If these and such -like you can bear,
Then like, and love, and never fear!

This, too, as I find, is by Thomas Campion.
Indeed I cannot keep my fingers from the ripe
clusters of his honeyed songs, which hang like
grapes upon the boughs of poetry. It is not
that I seek him out ; but he is so admirable in
his art that the airs which linger in my memory
are mostly his. Perhaps another gatherer of fruit
from this abundant garden would be attracted by
the songs of other singers. Campion has for me
particular charm. Listen to this deep harmony of
his. It is addressed to some cruel fair one :

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finished love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty's sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, 0 tell, how thou didst murder me.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 287

Was ever the entrance of a proud beauty into
the myrtle groves of Elysium, and her reception
by the fabled dames of Hellas, more delicately
imagined ? Was ever a scholar's and a courtier's
compliment more subtly turned to love's up-
braiding ?

Well, we must leave Campion for a moment.
Take one of the unnamed and unremembered
poets :

We must not part as others doy

With sighs and tears, as we were two :

Though with these outward forms we part.

We keep each other in the heart.

What search hath found a being where

I am not, if that thou be there?

True love hath wings, and can as soon
Survey the world as sun and moon;
And everywhere our triumphs keep
O'er absence which makes others weep :
By which alone a power is given
To live on earth, as they in heaven.

The spiritual note in that last couplet reminds
me of another love-ditty, again by Campion, which
paints love in its most celestial form. A lady
refuses her lover upon earth, and refers him to
the charity of souls in heaven, where there is
neither marrying nor giving in marriage :

288 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

So quick, so hot, so mad is thy fond suit,
So rude, so tedious grown in urging me,

That fain I would with loss make thy tongue mute,
And yield some little grace to quiet thee:

An hour with thee I care not to converse,

For I would not be counted too perverse.

But roofs too hot would prove for me all fire,
And hills too high for my unused pace;

The grove is charged with thorns and the bold briar;
Grey snakes the meadows shroud in every place:

A yellow frog, alas ! will fright me so

As I should start and tremble as I go.

Since then I can on earth no fit room find,
In heaven I am resolved with you to meet :

Till then, for hope's sweet sake, rest your tired mind,
And not so much as sec me in the street:

A heavenly meeting one day we shall have,

But never, as you dream, in bed or grave.

John Dowland shall now present us with one
of his dreamy melodies in linked sweetness long
drawn out :

Weep you no more, sad fountains ;

What need you flow so fast ?
Look how the snowy mountains

Heaven's sun doth gently waste I
But my sun's heavenly eyes

View not your weeping;

That now lies sleeping
Softly, now softly lies

Sleeping.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 289

Sleep is a reconciling,

A vest that peace begets ;
Doth not the sun rise smiling,

When fair at even he sets ?
Rest you then, rest, sad eyes !

Melt not in weeping;

While she lies sleeping,
Softly, now softly lies

Sleeping.

That is delicious in its drowsy way. And so
is the next, by Dowland also :

Flow not so fast ye fountains :

What needeth all this haste?

Swell not above your mountains,

Nor spend your time in waste.

Gentle springs, freshly your salt tears
Must still fall, dropping from their spheres.

Weep they apace, whom Reason

Or lingering Time can ease :

My sorrow can no season,

Nor ought besides appease.

Gentle springs, freshly your salt tears
Must still fall, dropping from their spheres.

Time can abate the terror

Of every common pain :

But common grief is error,

True grief will still remain.

Gentle springs, freshly your salt tears
Must still fall, dropping from their spherts.

T

290 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

Dowland clearly was of the opinion that
" mountains " and " fountains," " haste " and
"waste," "sleeping" and "weeping," "tears"
and " spheres " were good. Indeed, the exqui-
site and ever fresh use which is made of these
hackneyed verse-materials by the old song-
writers stirs our wonder. " Cruel " and "jewel,"
" treasure " and " measure," " fashion " and
"passion" recur again and again. We accept
the poor rhymes as part of the game, marvelling
at the lyrist's inventive skill in setting them.
Somehow, while we read, we feel the music
between the verses ; and the music justifies the
rhymes.

Let us now hear a maiden complaining of
man's inconstancy :

Go, turn away those cruel eyes,

For they have quite undone nte;

They used not so to tyrannize,

When first those glances won me.

But 'tis the custom of you men —

False men, thus to deceive us!
To love but till we love again,

And then again to leave us.

Go, let alone my heart and me,

Which thou hast thus affrighted/

I did not think I could by thee
Have been so ill requited.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 291

But now I find 'tis I must prove
That men have no compassion;

When we are won, you never love
Poor women, but for fashion.

Do recompense my love with hate,
And kill my heart! I'm sure

Thou' It one day say, when 'tis too late,
Thou never hadst a truer.

The man's tone, under similar circumstances,
is lighter, as the following ditty shows, one
stanza of which I will quote, because of its fan-
ciful refrain :

While that the sun with his beams hot

Scorched the fruits in vale and mountain,
Philon, the shepherd, late forgot,

Sitting beside a crystal fountain,
In shadow of a green oak tree,
Upon his pipe this song played he :
Adieu, love! adieu, love! untrue love!
Untrue love ! untrue love ! adieu love !
Your mind is light, soon lost for new love.

I mentioned Robert Jones as one of those
poets whose verses have a certain individuality.
The following is a fair specimen of his style :

How many new years have grown old
Since first your servant old was new !
How many long hours have I told
Since first my love was vowed to yott !
And yet, alas! she doth not know
Whether her servant love or no.

392 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

How many watts as white as snow,
And windows clear as any glass,
Have I conjured to tell you so,

Which faithfully performed was !

A nd yet you'll swear you do not know

Whether your servant love or no.

How often hath my pale lean face,
With true characters of my love,
Petitioned to you for grace,
Whom neither sighs nor tears can move.

0 cruel, yet do yon not know
Whether your servant love or no.

And wanting oft a better token,

1 have been fain to send my heart,
Which now your cold disdain hath broken,
Nor can you heart by any art:

O look upon't, and you shall know
Whether your servant love or no.

The fluency of this poet, combined with a
certain substance of thought, may be exemplified
by the following stanza :

Thine eyes, that some as stars esteem,
From whence themselves, they say, take light,
Like to the foolish fire I deem
That leads men to their death by night;
Thy words and oaths are light as wind,
And yet far lighter is thy mind;
Thy friendship is a broken reed
That fails thy friend in greatest need.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 293

Robert Jones, however, when compared with
Campion and certain other lyrists, was but a
journeyman in verse. This airy little waif of
anonymous melody has more the ring of ster-
ling poetry than his lengthy and pretentious
compositions :

Farewell, my love, I go,
If Fate will have it so I
Yet, to content us both,
Return again as doth

The bee unto the flower,
The cattle to the brook.

The shadow to the hour,

The fish unto the hook,
That we may sport our fill
And love continue still.

And how metaphysical, how quaint, how finv
is this of Campion ! It seems to be an answer
to Shakespeare's " Tell me where is fancy
bred " :

Are you what your fair looks express?

O then be kind !
From law of nature they digress

Whose form suits not their mind:
Fairness seen in W outward shape
Is but /&' inward beauty's ape.

Eyes that of earth are mortal made,
What can they view?

.: ,4 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

All's but a colour or a shade,

And neither always true:
Reason's sight, that is etern,
E'en the substance can discern.

Soul is the Alan: for who will so

The body name?
And to that power all grace we owe,

That decks our living frame.
What or how had housen bin
But for them that dwell therein ?

Love in the bosom is begot,

Not in the eyes;
No beauty makes the eye more hot,

Her flames the sprite surprise :
Let our loving minds then meet,
For pure meetings are most sweet.

How grave and earnest are Campion's admo-
nitions to a Cherubino of the period !

Thou joyest, fond boy, to be by many loved
To have thy beauty of most dames approved ;
For this dost thou thy native worth disguise,
And playest the sycophant t' observe their eyes:
Thy glass thou counsell'st, more to adorn thy skin,
That first should school thee to be fair within.

'Tis childish to be caught with pearl or amber,
And womanlike too much to cloy the chamber;
Youths should the fields affect, heat their rough steeds,
Their hardened nerves to fit for better deeds :
Is't not more joy strongholds to force with swords
Than women's weakness take with looks or words?

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 295

Men that do noble things all purchase glory,
One man for one brave act hath proved a story ;
But if that one ten thousand dames overcame,
Who would record it, if not to his shame ?
'Tis far more conquest with one to live true
Than every hour to triumph lord of new.

It is hard to believe that the man who com-
posed those serious lines, wrote also the follow-
ing piece of exquisite light fancy :

/ care not for these ladies

That must be woo'd and pray'd,
Give me kind Amaryllis,

The wanton country maid:
Nature art disdaineth,
Her beauty is her own :

Her when we court and kiss :

She cries "Forsooth, let go!'

But when we come where comfort is,

She never will say "No."

If I love Amaryllis,

She gives me fruit and flowers;
But if we love these ladies,

We must give golden showers.
Give them gold that sell love,
Give me the nut-brown lass,

Who when we court and kiss

She cries "Forsooth, let go!"

But when we come where comfort in,

She never will say " No."

296 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

These ladies must have pillows
And beds by strangers wrought;

Give me a bower of willows,
Of moss and leaves wibought :

And fresh Amaryllis,

With milk and honey fed,

Who when we court and kiss,
She cries "Forsooth, let go!"
But when we come when comfort is,
She never will say "No."

John Dowland's descant upon constancy in
love yields one stanza, worthy to rank with
Campion's in his philosophic mood:

Nature two eyes hath given,

All beauty to impart
As well in earth as heaven,

Bat she hath given one heart;

That though we see
Ten thousand beauties, yet in us One should be,

One steadfast love,

Because our hearts stand fixt although our eyes
do move.

Once more I must return to my beloved
master Campion. With what serene and simple
lucidity the thought flows, and how pleasantly
the cadence falls in these two stanzas :

When to her lute Corinna sings,
Her voice revives the leaden strings,
And doth in highest notes appear
As any challenged echo clear:

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 297

But when she doth of mourning speak,
E'en with her sighs the strings do break.

And as her lute doth live or die,

Led by her passion, so must I :

For when of pleasure she doth sittg,

My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring;

Bid if she doth of sorrow speak,

E'en from my heart the strings do break.

Hardly less beautiful in the same limpid
measure are the following lines by an anonymous
writer :

Dear, do not your fair beauty wrong
In thinking still you are too young ;
The rose and lily in your cheek
Flourish, and no more ripening seek;
Inflaming beams shot from your eye
Do show Love's Midsummer is nigh;
Your cherry lip, red, soft, and sweet,
Proclaims such fruit for taste is meet ;
Love is still young, a buxom boy,
And younglings are allowed to toy:
Then lose no time, for love hath wings,
A nd flies away from aged things.

Before quitting the Elysium of lovers, I shall in-
dulge myself in one more quotation. This shall
be a dialogue between a lover and his mistress,
composed by some unknown versifier. The
swain speaks in the first stanza, praying the
maiden of his heart to come forth from her

298 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

chamber and walk the meadows with him. She
replies in the second, giving good reasons for
staying at home :

Open the door! Who's there within?

The fairest of thy mother's kin I

O come, come, come abroad
And hear the shrill birds sing,

The air with tunes that load!
It is too soon to go to rest,
The sun not midway yet to west:

The day doth miss thee
And will not part until it kiss thee.

Were I as fair as you pretend,
Yet to an unknown seld-seen friend
I dare not ope the door:

To hear the sweet birds sing

Oft proves a dangerous thing.
The sun may run his wonted race
And yet not gaze on my poor face,

The day may miss me :
Therefore depart, you shall not kiss me.

So far as the lyrics from the song-books are
known to me, there is nothing gross or licentious
in them ; even those translated from Italian
sources have been bettered in tone by the pro-
cess, losing something of their sensuous languor,
assuming something of that fresh ethereal air
which is a peculiar beauty of English poetry in
the Elizabethan period.

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 299

I pass now to miscellaneous lyrics, some of
which take a humorous turn, while others
trench upon the ballad. Here is a quaint sort
of fable, extracted from Weelkes' Madrigals,
1600:

A sparrow-hawk proud did hold in wicked jail
Music's sweet chorister, the nightingale,
To whom with sighs she said: "O set me free!
And in my song I'll praise no bird but thee."
The hawk replied, " / will not lose my diet
To let a thousand such enjoy their quiet."

The next catch, in which an owl is addressed,
has something of the same quaintness ; though
why owls should be localized in Suffolk, I cannot
say. It comes from Vautor's Songs of divers
Airs and Natures, 1600 :

Sweet Suffolk owl, so trimly dight
With feathers like a lady bright,
Thou sing'st alone, sitting by night,
Te whit, te whoo!

Thy note, that forth so freely rolls,
With shrill command the mouse controls,
And sings a dirge, for dying souls,
Te whit, te whoo!

There is a charming little poem in which one
girl bids her sister wake at dawn, inviting her to
wander forth into the park beneath their window.
We owe this to Bateson's First set of English
Madrigals, 1604 :

300 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

Sister, awake ! close not your eyes !

The day her light discloses,
And the bright morning doth arise

Out of her bed of roses.

See, the clear sun, the world's bright eye,

In at our window peeping:
Lo! how he blusheth to espy

Us idle wenches sleeping.

Therefore, awake! make haste, I say,

A fid let us, without staying,
A II in our gowns of green so gay

Into the park a-maying.

What a dewy morning-freshness greets us in
these careless stanzas ; how prettily the ruddy
dawn is turned into conceits of roses and of
blushes. The style is so simple, the feeling so
spontaneous, that we pardon those innocent
concetti. And the last line carries with it a waft
from the burden of a greater poet's masterpiece :

Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-maying.

Ravenscroft's Melismata and Deuteromelia deal
with a different class of airs from those which
have hitherto delayed us. It is in these collec-
tions that we find the pathetic old ballad of the
Three Ravens, with the melody which Jenny
Lind made famous by her thrilling voice and fine

ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS 301

dramatic declamation some five-and-twenty years
ago. Here too is the catch of the three sailors :

We be three poor manners.

"A wooing song of a Yeoman of Kent's
Son " is another anonymous ditty borrowed from
Melismata:

I have house and land in Kent,
And if you love nte, love me now;

Twopence-halfpenny is my rent,
I cannot come every day to woo.

(Chorus) Twopence-halfpenny is his rent,

And he cannot come every day to woo.

This humorous song, extending to many stanzas,
still survives upon the lips of our rustic popula-
tion. You may hear it, with local variations, at
merry-makings in Somersetshire.

One word in conclusion. The songs we have
read together are unequal in artistic merit.
Some few of them may be valued as flawless
gems ; and these will pass, I doubt not, into the
Golden Treasuries of English lyric poetry. An
attentive ear, however, catches many defective
accents, halting cadences, slovenly and careless
rhymes, prosaic phrases breaking disagreeably
on the rhythm. We have to remember that they
were made for the singing voice and viol. The
unheard melodies of that old music ought to

302 ELIZABETHAN SONG-BOOKS

sound in our brain while reading them. I do not
say this by way of excuse or apology. I only
wish to indicate the way in which they should be
taken. Their charm of unaffected grace, their
beauty and fragrance as of wilding flowers, re-
main precious gifts. Few poets, alas ! in this
age, are natural enough to " recapture that first
fine careless rapture," which was as native to the
lyrists of the sixteenth century as to thrush or
linnet.

PRINTED BY WM. CLOWES AND SONS, LTD.,
DUKE STREET, STAMFORD STREET, LONDON, ENGLAND.

IN THE KEY OF BLUE

AND

OTHER PROSE ESSAYS

BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

A few Press Opinions.

" Mr. Symonds gives us a series of dainty word-
pictures, both prose and verse. . . . The little poems
are marvels of careful workmanship and highly-wrought
precision of phrase." — The Speaker,

" Most charming, perhaps, of the half-dozen literary
essays in the volume is the generous and discriminating
appreciation of the late E. C. Lefroy's ' Sonnets ' — poems
so beautiful in form, so ' Greek ' in self-control, so
excellent in execution, that one can scarcely think the
world will let them easily be forgotten." — St. Jameses
Gazette.

11 By far the finest essays are those on literary
subjects ; and these are fine indeed." — Weekly Register.

"Descriptions of scenery, always touched with
supreme skill — literary criticism, make up the volume
full of excellent work." — Spectator.

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Symonds, John Addington
5522 In the key of blue
16

1893
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